Palace of the Parliament

Nicolae Ceaușescu returned from a visit to East Asia in 1971 impressed by the societal organisation and mass adulation he had seen under North Korea's Juche ideology, and decided to apply similar policies in Romania, with the stated goal of a "multilaterally developed socialist society". The systematization programme that followed found its most extreme expression in this building. A systematization plan for the area had existed since the 1930s under Carol II, with the Chamber of Deputies to stand on Dealul Arsenalului; demolitions were announced in 1938 and the war left it on paper. The Vrancea earthquake of 4 March 1977 gave Ceaușescu a pretext to demolish parts of old Bucharest and rebuild a civic centre in socialist realist style. Project Bucharest began in 1978 as an intended replica of Pyongyang. A national competition was won by Anca Petrescu (1949–2013), appointed chief architect at 28.

Demolition in the Uranus area began in 1982. Uranus Hill was levelled and the Uranus–Izvor neighbourhood destroyed; about 7 km² of the old city centre was demolished and 40,000 people were moved out. What stood there included the National Archives, the Brâncovenesc Hospital, Mihai Vodă and other monasteries, and some 37 old factories and workshops.

The foundation stone was laid on 25 June 1984 at a ceremony Ceaușescu attended, and he inspected the site frequently; Romanian accounts date the start of building a year earlier, to 1983. Petrescu worked through ten assisting architects supervising some 700 more. Between 20,000 and 100,000 people worked in three shifts, among them 5,000 Romanian People's Army soldiers and large numbers of "volunteers"; Romanian accounts describe the conscripts' labour as forced, and say it kept the cost to a minimum. The number of deaths during construction is disputed — official data give 27, while workers on the site speak of far higher figures, hundreds by some Romanian estimates and thousands by others; the communist authorities did not release the numbers. Through the 1980s the Romanian government ran a crippling austerity policy to pay the foreign debt. In 1989 the building's cost was estimated at US$1.75 billion.

Almost all the materials were of Romanian origin, among the few exceptions being the doors of the Nicolae Bălcescu Hall, a gift to Ceaușescu from his friend Mobutu Sese Seko, the president of Zaire. The building rises 84 m and runs 92 m below ground, its deepest underground level a shelter with 1.5-metre concrete walls said to be impervious to radiation, linked to the main state institutions by 20 km of tunnels, with a headquarters hall that would have had telephone connections to every military unit in Romania and apartments for the state leadership in war. Ceaușescu feared nuclear war.

Designed as the House of the Republic, the palace became widely known as the People's House after the December 1989 revolution. In 1990 the media magnate Rupert Murdoch offered US$1 billion for it and was refused. The Chamber of Deputies has sat here since 1994, after the state gave its former seat, now the Palace of the Patriarchate, to the Romanian Orthodox Church; the Senate followed in 2004 from the former headquarters of the Romanian Communist Party's Central Committee. The Unification Hall was inaugurated on 22 December 1994, the fifth anniversary of the revolution, and in 1995 Yehudi Menuhin conducted there at the reopening of the George Enescu International Music Festival. The National Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 2004 in the west wing, reached by a glass annexe built alongside the external lifts, and in 2008 the palace hosted the 20th NATO summit.

About 70% of the palace remains empty; in 2013 only 400 rooms and two large meeting rooms out of some 1,100 were reported finished and in use. It was valued at €4 billion in 2020, and heating and electricity alone cost over $6 million a year.

After Anca Petrescu's death her heirs sued the Chamber of Deputies over the use of images of the building and the sale of photographs and souvenirs depicting it, although the palace was financed from public funds and the architects worked for hire; they have set commercial use of its image at a 2% royalty, while legal experts hold that tourists photographing it for non-commercial purposes face no restriction. Besides the two chambers, the palace houses the Constitutional Court, the Museum of the Palace and an international conference centre, and it is open to visitors, with tours in several languages.