Bucharest’s Palace of the Parliament is the heaviest administrative building in the world, weighing over nine billion pounds, sinking about six millimeters a year, and costing over $6 million a year to heat and light. With 365,000 square meters of floor space, eight underground levels reaching 92 meters deep, and a volume 2 percent larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza, it began after Nicolae Ceausescu toured North Korea in 1971 and admired Kim Il-sung’s monumental Pyongyang. The 1977 Vrancea earthquake gave him the pretext for systematization: seven square kilometers of the Uranus-Izvor district were leveled, 40,000 people relocated, Brancovenesc Hospital demolished, and churches like Mihai Voda Monastery jacked up on concrete slabs and rolled away on rails.

Chief architect Anca Petrescu was just 28 when she won the design contest and led about 700 architects. Between 20,000 and 100,000 workers, including 5,000 soldiers, worked around the clock; the official death toll is 27, while workers speak of thousands. Romanians endured rationing, blackouts, and unheated homes as exports paid off debt and funded the House of the Republic. After Ceausescu’s execution in December 1989, the government refused Rupert Murdoch’s $1 billion offer and moved parliament and a contemporary art museum inside, though about 70 percent of its 1,100 rooms sit empty. After Petrescu died in 2013, her heirs sued the state seeking a 2 percent royalty on souvenirs.

• One million cubic meters of Romanian marble, 900,000 cubic meters of domestic wood, and 3,500 tons of crystal for 480 chandeliers
• Carpets so heavy that weaving machines were moved inside to make them in place
• Doors in Nicolae Balcescu Hall given by Zaire’s dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, the rare foreign exception
• A nuclear bunker with 1.5 meter thick concrete walls and 20 kilometers of tunnels to other institutions
• A 2010 shopping mall proposal, NATO summits, the 2011 Drift Grand Prix, and film roles in The Nun and War Dogs