Born as Mira Anca Victoria Mărculeţ Petrescu in the city of Sighișoara in Transylvania in 1949, Anca Petrescu achieved prominence as an architect and a politician under her shortened name. In 1973, she graduated from Ion Mincu Institute of Architecture, defending a thesis on the urbanization of urban peripheries.

Petrescu is known as the chief architect of the Palace of the People, a commission of Nicolae Ceaușescu, which responded to his vision of a representative government building. In 1982, when she was 28 years old, Petrescu’s neoclassical submission won the competition for the design of the political and administrative center of the country. Since 1984, under Petrescu’s supervision, the construction of the world’s second largest administrative building was conducted by the Carpathian Design Institute. A group of 700 architects and 20 thousand builders worked on this project until Ceaușescu’s assassination in 1989.

After the fall of Ceaușescu’s rule, Petrescu was accused of destroying a historic neighborhood in central Bucharest for the sake of a dictator’s whim. Fearing for her safety, she fled to France, where she found employment as an architect of a tourist company Club Med. In this capacity, she designed vacation facilities in Florida and the Bahamas.

In 1994, the Romanian government decided to move forward with the construction of the building, which was repurposed as the Palace of the Parliament of Romania. Petrescu returned to Bucharest to participate in the construction. In 2004, she was elected to the Romanian parliament, representing the nationalist Great Romanian party.