The Palace of the Parliament is one of the heaviest buildings in the world, weighing about 4,098,500,000 kilograms (9.04 billion pounds; 4.10 million tones), also being the second largest administrative building in the world. (The Great Pyramid of Giza at about 5.75 million tons is about 40% heavier.) 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, with socialist realism in mind. The Palace was ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989), the president of Communist Romania and the second of two long-ruling heads of state in the country since World War II, during a period in which the personality cult of political worship and adoration increased considerably for him and his family.
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