NowBucharest

Architecture

Architecture in Bucharest

Bucharest built itself a Parisian centre of boulevards and Beaux-Arts façades between the wars, when it was rich and looking west. Fifty years later Ceaușescu razed a fifth of that centre for a civic axis of his own, and the two cities now sit side by side.

• Palace of the Parliament

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  Completed 1997

  Anca Petrescu

  The seat of Romania's parliament, and the heaviest building on Earth. Anca Petrescu won the commission at twenty-eight and worked it up as a symmetrical mountain of Romanian marble for Ceaușescu, who levelled a whole historic quarter to clear its site. The interior runs to over a thousand rooms, many of them still unfinished. It was built to centre a city on one man, and outlived him by decades as a cost no one can undo.

• Arcul de Triumf

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  Completed 1936

  Petre Antonescu

  A triumphal arch on the northern boulevard, built in granite to replace the wood and plaster arches raised for earlier victory parades. Petre Antonescu modelled it on the Parisian arch but faced it in Romanian stone and sculpture. It marks the end of the axis the interwar city laid toward its northern parks. The permanent version fixed in stone what had gone up and come down three times before.

• Telephone Palace

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  Completed 1934

  Louis Weeks & Edmond van Saanen Algi

  Romania's first skyscraper, on Calea Victoriei in the centre. Louis Weeks and Edmond van Saanen Algi raised it on the country's first steel frame and stepped it back in the Art Deco manner of contemporary New York, funded by an American loan that came with a telephone monopoly. At 52 metres it stood as the tallest building in Bucharest for over twenty years. It dropped a piece of Manhattan onto a boulevard built to look like Paris.

• CEC Palace

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  Completed 1900

  Paul Gottereau

  The head office of the national savings bank, across the avenue from the Athenaeum. Paul Gottereau set a glass and iron dome over the banking hall and fronted it with a stone arch flanked by four smaller cupolas. The Beaux-Arts front was meant to make a young institution look old. It is a set piece of the boulevard the city built to resemble Paris.

• Romanian Athenaeum

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  Completed 1888

  Albert Galleron

  A concert hall on Calea Victoriei, home of the George Enescu Philharmonic. Albert Galleron fronted a round domed auditorium with a Greek temple portico, paid for by a public subscription when the state would not. The circular hall behind the columns is ringed by a fresco of Romanian history. It became the building the country points to as the seat of its culture.