grandiosity

grandiosity 01.09.10

city form: architecture

The Parliamentary Palace is the largest building in Europe, and second largest building in the world, after the Pentagon in Washington DC. A pet project of Nicolae Ceauşescu and part of his cult of personality, the palace was built atop a former historic district, displacing tens of thousands to dominate the skyline of a city otherwise relatively devoid of topography. Constructed entirely of Romanian resources, the palace was the most expensive building in the world when it was built, and is still the heaviest building on the planet. Ceauşescu was never to use the palace due to the revolution and coup in 1989. In 1999 Donald Trump offered $2 billion to transform it into the largest casino in the world, but the Romanian government declined.

On the backside of the building is a modern architectural intervention — lightweight canopies and a pair of glass and steel elevators attached to the façade announce MNAC, the National Museum of Contemporary Art, which occupies a small portion of the vast palace.

Though on an entirely different scale, Romanian village architecture has quite a rich legacy, celebrated at the Museum of the Romanian Village, as well as by a collaboration between Romanian architecture students and the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris.