Bucharest

Nicolae Ceaușescu visited Pyongyang in 1971, returned to Bucharest, and demolished 80% of the city's historic center to build a palace heavier than the Great Pyramid of Giza. That single act—razing 30,000 houses, schools, and churches to erect a 365,000-square-meter building that costs over $6 million annually just to heat and light—is the most extreme example of state-imposed urban destruction in European history. It is also perfectly consistent with Bucharest's pattern: a city whose identity is repeatedly erased and rewritten by whoever holds power.

Bucharest first appears in documents in 1459, during the reign of Vlad III (better known as Vlad the Impaler). It became Romania's capital in 1862 when Wallachia and Moldavia unified, and the second half of the nineteenth century transformed it into what admirers called 'Little Paris of the East.' Young Romanian elites studied in France and returned to build Haussmann-style boulevards, neoclassical theaters, and the Calea Victoriei—Bucharest's Champs-Élysées. The Belle Époque city was genuine: French architecture, French cuisine, French-speaking salons. Then the Depression, World War II, and forty-five years of communist rule systematically dismantled that identity.

The 1977 Vrancea earthquake gave Ceaușescu the pretext he needed. The Palace of the Parliament—the world's heaviest building at 4.1 million tonnes and the most expensive administrative building on Earth, valued at €4 billion—rose from the rubble of the historic center. Between 20,000 and 100,000 workers were conscripted; estimates of construction deaths reach 3,000. The palace was never finished before Ceaușescu's execution in December 1989, but Romania's parliament moved in during 1994 and now occupies a fraction of the building's 1,100 rooms.

Bucharest generates roughly 24% of Romania's GDP with 9% of its population—a concentration ratio that makes the capital both engine and vulnerability. Living standards in the Bucharest-Ilfov region reached 145% of the EU average by purchasing power parity. The city has become one of Europe's fastest-growing tech hubs, with IT outsourcing and software development attracting investment that the old industrial base could never sustain. Population sits at approximately 1.76 million in the city proper, declining by 0.5% annually as suburban sprawl pulls residents outward.

The tension between the 'Little Paris' heritage and the brutalist communist overlay defines Bucharest's streetscape and psychology. Romania joined the EU in 2007 and Schengen in 2024, but the palace still dominates the skyline—too expensive to demolish, too loaded with history to ignore, too large to repurpose efficiently. It is the world's most literal example of path dependence in architecture: a building nobody would build today that shapes every decision about what the city can become tomorrow.