This Is the Heaviest Building in the World
Ask me what the world’s biggest building is, or tallest, or largest by square area, and I probably have a guess for you. I’ll rifle through a mental Rolodex of architectural postcards and toss out the Burj Dubai. I’d feel pretty good about it, too, unless someone else has since put up a taller structure in the global contest for largest erection, double meaning entirely intentional.
Ask me what the world’s heaviest building is, however, and suddenly my mind is swimming. I’m reaching for the ropes, thinking about things like the density of marble. That single trivia question sent me to the court like one of Kyrie Irving’s spin moves, flat on my back like the world he imagines.
It’s truly a beautiful specimen of a trivia question, because it is so deeply useless. Weight isn’t the way that any non-architect or engineer interacts with a building. It’s essential to its physical viability, but offers no noticeable, naked-eye benefit to its inhabitants. I have to imagine that the heaviest building on earth has a huge variety of engineering challenges attached to it, and for what seems to be possibly no purpose at all.
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Deep appreciation for the sideways nature of this question aside, let’s look at the answer, and I’m willing to bet it’s not any of the go-to big honkin’ buildings you were thinking of throwing out.
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This is the heaviest building in the world: The Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest, Romania.
It competes with other famously large structures around the world in various specifications, but never tops the list outside of pure weight. The palace, built on the orders of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu starting in 1984, covers 365,000 square feet, which contain 20 stories, 12 above ground and 8 below. This puts it slightly ahead of monuments like the Great Pyramid of Giza in sheer size, and it’s the second largest administrative building in the world behind the U.S. Pentagon.
But it's the materials used that make it an absolute monster of mass. The palace is made up of 1.5 billion pounds of steel and bronze, 35.3 million cubic feet of marble, 31.7 million cubic feet of wood and 7.7 million pounds of crystal. The total weight? Roughly 9 billion pounds. It’s so heavy that even the Earth itself can’t fully handle it, as it’s reportedly sinking a few millimeters every year as the sediment below it is compacted.
Honestly, it’s exactly the kind of building a leader who's going to end up being executed dreams of.
