Empire State Building. Being a much wider structure, the palace was estimated to weigh over 1.5 million tons, and have a gross volume of over 7.5 million cubic meters. Its net internal volume would have surpassed the combined volume of six largest American skyscrapers of the period. The palace would require 350.000 tons of structural steel, six times more than the Empire State Building and almost twice as much as the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge). The grand hall seating 21 thousand people had to have an inner diameter of , an outer diameter of , a height of meters and internal volume of 970,000 cubic meters. The "small" hall had 5,000 seats and a height of . The "even smaller" Constitution Hall and Reception Hall in the stylobate measured and . Floors in the office tower were planned to have a usable height of , for even more session halls of various government branches. The exact number of floors was not disclosed. Enormous as it was, the palace's grand hall was much smaller than Albert Speer's Volkshalle, designed to hold 180 thousand people, but the Russian palace surpassed the Volkshalle in total height. Structure The completed palace would have consisted of two parts resting on two independent foundations: the circular core with the grand hall, the office tower and the statue of Lenin; and a rectangular stylobate adjacent to the core. The core's concrete foundations rested on limestone bedrock below the level of the Moskva River. The much lighter, tall stylobate could safely rest on the uppermost limestone sill, below the ground. The stylobate design used a traditional steel frame; on the contrary, the frame of the core was radically unconventional. Instead of running the whole vertical height of the building, the palace's load-bearing columns had to wrap around the grand hall. Thus, the frame was split into three distinct segments. The lower segment, tall, comprised 32 pairs of vertical columns placed around the grand hall and connected to the foundation slab via massive riveted "shoes". These "shoes" rested on massive steel plates implanted into the concrete slab. Columns of the second segment were placed at a 22° angle, forming a tent over the grand hall up to the mark. Above it, a traditional vertical frame would be used. Two massive steel rings, similar to the hoops that hold the staves of a barrel together would hold the tent. These