Bucharest 3 - The World's Second Largest Building

Today we saw the world's second largest building (the Pentagon is the largest).   It's the Palace of Parliament, and was constructed (but not finished) under the regime of Ceausescu.  It was a shattering and confounding experience.    It's an appalling monument, created by a true megalomaniac tyrant, and a testimony to the extremes of fanaticism.  The building was conceived by Ceausescu as a moment to himself, conceived on the scale of a Versailles or Winter Palace.   It has 1,100 rooms, only 400 of which were ever finished.   It required 700 architects, and 20,000 laborers working in shifts 24 hours a day for many years.   It cost billions of dollars at a time when many Romanian people did not have enough to eat.  It's one thing to read about the French kings building their palaces and bankrupting their nation, and its another thing to conceive of a man doing the same thing with such absolute power in our current age.

The building from the outside is quite ugly, littered with ill-proportioned neoclassical elements.

This is the side view, the front is much longer:

Entrance is via guided tours only, and done with a security process and byzantine bureaucracy worthy of the building's totalitarian  origins.   But what is finally confounding as you go through the tour is the sheer opulence and jaw-dropping size of the rooms.  It really looks like a brand new (and larger) Versailles or Winter Palace.  And in fact there is clearly a great deal of craftsmanship that went in to creating these state rooms.  There are numerous enormous chandeliers, wood carvings, decorative plaster, grandiose marble stairways, etc.  It's all truly unbelievable, as if you had been transplanted to some strange movie set.   It's confounding because you are naturally awed by the place while at the same time appalled by its origins as the product of great tyranny.   Ceausescu really was crazy.  Our guide pointed out some ventilation spaces in the ceiling, and told us that Ceausescu refused to allow air conditioning to be installed because he was afraid it would be used to poison him.

Pictures cannot really convey the enormous size of the interior spaces.

 This is the ceiling of the concert hall.   There are enormous chandeliers everywhere in the building:

There are endless corridors, with state rooms that are mostly empty:

A ceiling:

A skylight:

Enough is enough!   You get the picture..

At the end, you are taken to the balcony overlooking the "grand boulevard" created by Ceausescu to lead up to his palace.   It's deliberately a few feet wider than the Champs Elysee.   This was created by destroying entire neighborhoods of older parts of Bucharest.

A few details of the exterior;

At the end, I half wanted to see it destroyed, because if you admire it, you are in fact doing what Ceausescu wanted to happen.   On the other hand, I also think the people that worked on it should be remembered, too.   In the meantime, the Romanian government is using part of the building for its parliament. Other parts are used as conference centers, and another part has been turned into a contemporary art museum.   And there are still 700 rooms, unused and unfinished!