Parliament Palace in Bucharest, among the most beautiful buildings in the world

By Andra Beltz
The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest is among the most beautiful civil constructions in the world. The palace was ranked 37th according to a study by the British site “RoofingMegastore”. He even managed to overtake the famous Parisian cathedral Notre Dame, which was ranked 46th out of 50.
But how was it possible for the Palace of Parliament to hold this position? In the study, the British used a method of analysis famous since the time of the pyramids. It is the “golden number”, also known as the number of ideal proportions. It is considered to be the expression of harmony and perfect proportions in art and is used in various segments, from photography to architecture.
In compiling this top, both millennial and some contemporary buildings were taken into account.
The Palace reaches a height of 84 meters (276 ft), has a floor area of 365,000 square meters (3,930,000 sq ft), and a volume of 2,550,000 cubic meters (90,000,000 cu ft). The Palace of the Parliament is the heaviest building in the world, weighing about 4,098,500,000 kilograms (9.04 billion pounds; 4.10 million tonnes).
The building was designed and supervised by chief architect Anca Petrescu, with a team of approximately 700 architects, and constructed over a period of 13 years (1984–97) in modernist Neoclassical architectural forms and styles. The Palace was ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989), the president of Romania.
The building has eight underground levels, the deepest housing a nuclear bunker, linked to main state institutions by 20 kilometers (12.4 mi) of tunnels. The bunker is a room with 1.5-metre (4.9 ft) thick concrete walls said to be impervious to radiation. The shelter is composed of the main hall – headquarters which would have had telephone connections with all military units in Romania – and several residential apartments for state leadership, to be used in the event of war.
The palace’s floor area of 365,000 square meters (3,930,000 sq ft) makes it the world’s second-largest administrative building after the Pentagon. It is also among the most massive buildings in terms of volume, measuring 2,550,000 cubic meters (90,000,000 cu ft); for comparison, the building exceeds by 2% the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.