The House of the Free Press (Casa Presei Libere) is a Stalinist building and a remarkable landmark in the north of Bucharest, close to King Michael I Park.
The building was constructed on the site of a former horse track between 1952 and 1956 following the plans of the architect Horia Maicu. The design can be described as the Stalinist style of Socialist realism and resembles the main building of the Moscow State University. The initial name of the building was Casa Scînteii, after the Romanian Communist Party’s official newspaper called ‘Scînteia’, and was intended to house all of Bucharest’s printing presses, newsrooms, and their staff.
Today the building still has the same function and houses many of the current newspapers’ headquarters, however, after the fall of communism, the name has been changed to House of the Free Press. For a while, it also housed the Bucharest Stock Exchange in its southern wing.
The enormous building’s foundation measures 280 by 260 meters and it has a surface of 32,000 m2 and has a volume of 735,000 m³. The building itself (without the antenna) has a height of 91.6 meters and including the antenna it reaches 104 meters high. Upon completion it became the tallest building in Bucharest, surpassing the Telephone Palace (52.5m), a status it kept until it was surpassed by the Tower Center International (120m) on Victory Square in 2007.
A statue of Vladimir Lenin that was placed in front of the building in 1960 was removed following the 1989 Revolution and replaced by the new Monument of the Anti-Communist Struggle in 2015.
