Parliament House, Canberra

Parliament House is the seat of the Australian Parliament, built into Capital Hill in Canberra at the southern point of the city's National Triangle and opened by Queen Elizabeth II on May 9, 1988. Designed by the architect Romaldo Giurgola of Mitchell, Giurgola and Thorp, the building was conceived so that most of its 250,000 square meters of floor space and more than 4,500 rooms sit buried beneath the hill, allowing the earlier Old Parliament House to remain visible in front of it and the site's grass-covered roof, open to visitors, to read as an extension of the landscape rather than an imposing structure. Rising 107 meters at its flagmast, which flies a flag measuring 6.4 by 12.8 meters, the building cost more than 1.1 billion dollars to construct. Its layout deliberately places public spaces above the chambers of the elected representatives, a design intended to express that in Australia's system the people stand above the government.