Palace Of The Parliament,Bucharest

Twenty-three years after communism collapsed, the Palace of the Parliament has emerged as an unlikely pillar of Romania's nascent democracy.

And while it remains one of the most controversial projects of Ceausescu's 25-year rule it's also now a tourist attraction, visited by tens of thousands of Romanians and foreigners every year.

The palace, so big it can be seen from space opened its doors in early 1990. Described by some as a giant Stalinist wedding cake, it's the world's second-largest administrative building after the Pentagon, at 350,000 square meters (3.77 million square feet).

Parliament and the Constitutional Court are housed inside. But over time the palace has become as much a magnet for glamorous events and celebrity photo-ops as it is a site for government affairs.

Brides pose in front of the yellow-stoned facade, while weddings, balls, movies and fashion shows and shoots take place inside. It's hosted celebrities – Michael Jackson moonwalked in front of the building after a press conference, Colombian pop star Shakira sang outside in the pouring rain, and Hollywood actor Ethan Hawke attending a ball there to raise money for disadvantaged children. Visiting politicians have included former U.S. President George Bush, Russia's Vladimir Putin, and in October, German chancellor Angela Merkel, who made a speech to 16 European prime ministers.

Construction on the grandiose project began in the early 1980s, when food rationing and power cuts were common. Some 9,000 homes were demolished, residents were given just days to vacate their homes, churches and synagogues were razed or moved, and two mountains of marble were hacked down for the 84-meter (275-foot) high palace to be built.

Ceausescu designed the palace to house the government and Parliament after the devastating earthquake of 1977 where swaths of buildings crumbled in the capital and more than1,500 people died. A semi-literate son of a peasant, Ceausescu was nothing if not ambitious: He wanted the new building to withstand any earthquake and last 500 years.

A million Romanians, including thousands of soldiers, were enlisted to work around the clock on the construction. Today's tours sample only parts of the building and last just one to two hours, but it would take a day to visit all the rooms and almost an hour just to walk around the perimeter.

Petrescu, the chief architect, insists that Buckingham Palace and Versailles were her artistic inspirations, not North Korean architecture, even though Ceausescu sent architects on a visit to Pyongyang to study architecture there after he was inspired during a 1971 visit. She says it's neo-classic in in style, while others diplomatically call the style `'eclectic."

"This building ended up such big due to a technical reason," she insisted. "There were supposed to be three big institutions in here: the presidency, the executive and the legislative corps.

She said that if Ceausescu – who was tried and executed Dec. 25, 1989 – were alive to see what had become of it, he "would make the sign of the cross" – a Romanian expression that means he'd be horrified.

Valentina Lupan, one of 2,000 architects who worked on the project says Ceausescu "was demented. Why did he want the biggest building? Like Hitler, like Mussolini, dictators love architects. Trust me on this. They, the dictators, imagine themselves as architects of the new world."