International Conference Centre

  Bucharest, whose founding is linked either to the legend of the shepherd Bucur, who established a settlement on the banks of the Dâmboviţa River, or to the voivode Negru Vodă, who laid the foundations of a residence and an exchange center - is located on a site with a great historical significance (archaeological discoveries attest to the age of human settlements of over 150,000 years: Fundeni, Dudeşti, Pipera, Dealul Spirii and the Mihai-Vodă monastery - the latter located in the immediate vicinity of the Palace of Parliament).

   The story of the Palace of Parliament building and the area in which it was located is strongly intertwined with the early years of Bucharest, but also with the city's golden age, when it was nicknamed ”Little Paris”.

   Bucharest, like other European capitals, was born on the banks of a river, Dâmboviţa, a river that caused serious flooding for hundreds of years.  In 1862 ”the waters swelled, reaching the top floor of the houses, and people were climbing out the windows”. The birthplace of the seat of Wallachia, as the city was called in the past, is the Palace and the Old Court¹, located near the Manuc Inn², not far from where the Palace of Parliament is today.

  The image of the city of Bucharest, until its transformation into ”Little Paris”, as it appears in old panoramic images, can be summarized as follows: ”a green expanse, from which only the church spires rose like verticals” or a city with ”narrow and winding streets, with those famous arteries lined with wooden beams – the so-called bridges”³.

   &Incirc;between 1840–1894, 29 Romanian architects graduated from the ”Ecole des Beaux Arts„ in Paris; they constituted the first generation of architects who started the process of transforming Bucharest into a European capital, together with a group of French architects.

   The shaping of its own identity as a Western city is linked to the years 1859 – The Union of the Principalities and  1877 - the gaining of Independence by Romania.

   The phrase ”Little Paris” appeared in the last days of the 19th century and became established around the 1900s. Elegant buildings in the French and Italian Renaissance style, Orthodox churches in the Baroque style, villas in the Second Empire style are still partially preserved today in the central ring of the city: houses, shops, palaces, public buildings, etc. Bucharest has taken over on a smaller scale the model of imposing public palaces from the French-speaking world. More than the buildings with special architecture, Bucharest became “Little Paris” due to the atmosphere, French being frequently spoken on the street and on certain social levels.

   Andre Bellesort, who was in Bucharest at the beginning of the last century, said of the Palace of Justice that it was so spacious that it could accommodate “the litigants and lawyers of the five parts of the world”, of the National Bank he believed it to be “the most beautiful temple erected to blind luck” and of the Post Office he reported that, every time he passed by there, the high dignitary Sturdza made the sign of the cross, knowing how much it had cost.

   Bucharest was the first city in the world to be illuminated with gas lamps (1856), followed by Vienna where the first lamps were installed only in 1859.

   About ”Little Paris”, with its main artery Calea Victoriei, illuminated ”a giorno” and crossed by the most modern taxis of that time, journalists from the New York Times wrote that it was the only street in Bucharest that had the power to attract tourists as if there were a magnet under the asphalt.

   The years that followed the Second World War, with all kinds of deprivations, brought the establishment of the Romanian communist regime, and constitute another period of numerous architectural transformations in Bucharest, including the erection of the Palace of Parliament building,  but none of these brought back the charm of ”Little Paris”.

  The Palace of Parliament rises on the site where the old Uranus neighborhood once stood. It was a neighborhood with small, sloping streets, paved with cubic stone and old houses, with old and chic Romanian houses, with a bohemian air, many of them creations of the architects of the time. The residents came from the middle class of society: merchants, craftsmen and small business owners.

   Former residents still have vivid memories of the routes of some streets, the appearance and color of some houses or buildings, the trams that climbed Uranus Hill with difficulty, the matches at the A.N.E.F. stadium, with tens of thousands of people filling the streets with their hustle and the murmur of comments, images preserved and in the film ”Angela Moves On” (1980), shortly before it was demolished.

   Shortly after the 1977 earthquake, when numerous old buildings in Bucharest collapsed, Ceauşescu summoned specialists and architects to the Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party to whom he presented the plan to build a new political and administrative center in Bucharest - a new socialist civic center. The specialists confirmed that the Uranus area would be the safest for the construction of new buildings, compared to the lower part of the city, where 28 old buildings had collapsed, causing over 1,400 human victims.