Nicolae Ceaușescu ordered the Palace of the Parliament as the centerpiece of his Project Bucharest, begun in 1978. Chief architect Anca Petrescu, appointed at age 28, led a team of about 700 architects. Groundbreaking was on June 25, 1984, and construction ran to 1997. The article calls the style Neoclassical in modernist forms, and the infobox lists Postmodern.
The palace is 276 feet (84 m) high, with 12 floors above ground and eight below, and about 1,100 rooms. Its floor area is 365,000 square meters, or nearly 3.93 million square feet. It is the heaviest building in the world and the largest civilian administrative building. Its volume exceeds the Great Pyramid of Giza by about 2 percent.
About 2.7 square miles (7 km²) of the old center were demolished, and about 40,000 people were relocated. The Chamber of Deputies moved in during 1994 and the Senate in 2004. About 70 percent of the building remains empty.
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