The creator of Ceaușescu's House of the People in Bucharest has died

Bucharest - Romanian architect Anca Petrescu, creator of the colossal Palace of the People in Bucharest, which now serves as a parliament, died in Bucharest due to the consequences of an August car accident. The colossus, which its admirers call grandiose and critics label monstrous, is the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon in Washington. Petrescu was 64 years old.
The Palace in Bucharest, which Petrescu designed after the catastrophic earthquake in 1977, was meant to symbolize the power of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. The city, referred to in the interwar period as "the Paris of the East", has been so disfigured by the construction, according to urban planners, that the metropolis lost its former charm. Ceaușescu himself never lived in it, having lost political influence before the building was completed in 1989.
Romanians wanted to blow up his palace after the fall of Ceaușescu, but ultimately felt sorry for the enormous investments. The construction consumed up to 25 percent of Romania's gross domestic product annually. The building, with an area of 330,000 square meters, filled with marble and equipped with secret corridors and a nuclear shelter, today forms an unloved landmark of Bucharest. The construction reportedly confuses even the guides, who sometimes get lost in it.
After the fall of communism, Petrescu was involved in politics, serving as a member of the Romanian parliament from 2004 to 2008 for the extreme nationalists of the Greater Romania Party. In early August, she became a victim of a serious car accident and fell into a coma in September. She succumbed to her injuries on Tuesday.