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So no one knows exactly why construction stopped?
It may be ugly, but, if its structurely sound, I don't see why another company couldn't finish it.
Oh yeah, Kim Jong il is a in whacko.
Still though, finish it and open it.
The Worst Building in the History of Mankind
It's the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world's 22nd largest skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that way ... forever.
By Eva Hagberg
A picture doesn't lie -- the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.
Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn't the just the worst designed building in the world -- it's the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished.
A bootleg video of the tower from YouTube. How the brazen videographer escaped without being arrested remains a mystery.
Construction on the Hotel of Doom stopped in 1992 (rumors maintain that North Korea ran out of money, or that the building was engineered improperly and can never be occupied) and has never started back up, which shouldn't come as a shock. After all, who the travels to beautiful downtown Pyongyang? It would make sense if the hotel were in South Korea, where Americans are allowed to travel and where projects like the Busan Lotte Tower and the Lotte Super Tower now rise thousands of feet above the formerly modest skyline.
With Pyongyang's official population said to range between 2.5 million and 3.8 million (official numbers are not made available by the North Korean government), the Ryugyong Hotel -- the 22nd largest skyscraper in the world -- is a failure on an enormous scale. To put it in context, imagine if the John Han Center (1,127 feet tall) in Chicago (population 2.9 million) was not only completely vacant, but unfinished with zero hope of ever being completed.
You may not be able to actually live there, but the building now has its own virtual real estate managers, Richard Dank and Andreas Gruber, a pair of German architects and self-described "custodians of the pyramid's diverse manifestations." The duo run Ryugyong.org, which they describe as an "experimental collaborative online architecture site." Sad you can't visit the building in real life? Log on, view the detailed 3-D models, and "claim" a subsection for yourself.
The Demolition S How video.
The Demolition S How video by the Italian architects Extraneo might not be as conceptual as Ryugyong.org, but this piece of architectural porn sure is fun to watch. The video (which you can watch above) was mounted as part of the exhibition Fiction Pyongyang, curated in part by Stefano Boeri, who also collected 120 speculative designs for the hotel in the June 2006 domus magazine. The designs, he says, "have forced it to reveal its icy nature, its irresistible fascination as a fragile alien meteorite." The worst building in the world is also, we now know, "the only built piece of science fiction in the contemporary world." And it's true. Demolition S How is all Blade Runner-style flying ads and soaring concrete, and the video reminds us that the worst building in the world is the closest humans have come to building a Death Star.
So no one knows exactly why construction stopped?
It may be ugly, but, if its structurely sound, I don't see why another company couldn't finish it.
Oh yeah, Kim Jong il is a in whacko.
Still though, finish it and open it.
Pyongyang: Home to the Tallest Hotel in the World That Could, but Will Never Be
The Ryugyong Hotel, a 105-Story Building Started in the Late '80s, Was Never Finished
By DAN BECKMANN
Oct. 23, 2006 —
Pyongyang's Ryugyong Hotel, a structure that if it were ever possible to finish would have been the world's tallest hotel, is symbolic of the state of North Korea itself.
The building is incredibly ambitious and very secretive. There are many conflicting versions of its story from the few you can find to talk about it.
One part that's almost always never left out is the assertion that one day the magnificent structure may just have to come down because whatever is holding it together has got to be faulty.
Yet it still continues to stand in staunch defiance of all outside it.
"You know the scene in 'The Wizard of Oz'?" asked Mike Chinoy, a former Asian correspondent for CNN and now the Edgarton fellow at the Pacific Council on Foreign Policy.
"Every time I've driven to [North Korea's capital] Pyongyang, there's this thing that's ticking up from way in the distance and it's so out of sync with everything that it becomes a great metaphor for North Korea in many ways."
Those interviewed had visited Pyongyang since the Ryugyong Hotel was started in the late '80s.
They all said virtually the same thing: As an outsider you just can't avoid asking what that humongous monstrosity is, but it's almost impossible to get anyone to talk about it -- let alone secure a hotel reservation for the night.
"The hotel's pretty incredible to see, and it does dominate the skyline," said Andrew Morse, an ABC News producer who's seen the building on his trips to Pyongyang.
"My Korean minders weren't keen to talk about it, so I don't know much, but I can definitely confirm that it exists," Morse said.
What Is and What Will Never Be
What you can see in a picture is the outline of a great pyramid with jetsonian revolving disks at the top.
There are no windows, pipes, lighting, fixtures, or the North Korean version of the AAA seal of approval hanging out front.
Nothing is inside the place but black shadows. A crane still sits at the top.
Emporis, an architectural information reporting firm, says the building is 105 stories tall.
If it was ever finished, it would be taller than any building in the United States.
It would also be the seventh-tallest building in the world to be used exclusively to house a five-star hotel of the highest luxury, with seven revolving restaurants on the top -- all for a country that today, as ABC News' Diane Sawyer reports, has a mere 300 foreigners within its borders.
And no, she did not stay at this hotel.
The Grandest of Hotels Built for Whom Exactly?
In a communist country that recently survived a famine in which it is estimated that more than 1 million people died, why was there ever a need for such massive luxury accommodations?
Depending upon which story you believe, the building may have been started to counter a massive South Korean-built hotel project in Singapore.
Another suggestion is that the government was attempting to build it to spark some tourism around the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, but ran out of time to get it done and just left it.
"I first saw it there in 1989," Chinoy said. "It was essentially the way it was now."
The most plausible speculation into why it was never finished comes from the lack of just about all the things you need to build a building -- let alone a monumental one -- such as raw materials, energy and well, money.
One of the more interesting tales is that there were so many problems with the project that they began to snowball because no one had the guts to report them to the "Great Leader" Kim Il Sung.
The story goes that the problems eventually became insurmountable and that the dysfunction was eventually made obvious without a word being spoken.
Ryugyong Hotel: Looming Symbol of North Korea Itself
There's some mutterings of finding an "outside developer" with $300 million to come in and save the day, but as Emporis reports, the cement used in the structure is not safe enough to continue the project and is presently crumbling.
So even if an outside developer wanted to finish the job, it would have to first start by knocking it down and starting over from scratch.
At the moment, it appears that the present-day leader, Kim Jong Il, has other more important things on his mind, too much pride, or a lack of resources to tear it town.
In the meantime, a good solution to the problem was forged in the uniquely North Korean way: The landmark has been taken off printed maps, and now everyone just changes the subject whenever it's mentioned.
"I have a sightseeing guide to North Korea [published in Pyongyang] in my hands," Morse said. "And there's no mention of it, and it's not on the maps in there."
They've done what Harry Houdini could have only dreamed: They've made an 105-story building, the largest of anything around, completely disappear. Presto!
"Kim Il Sung had this enormous crater or growth on the left side of his neck. It was enormous," Chinoy said.
"It was never photographed, and on occasions when I met him and we were allowed to shoot, we always had to be positioned in such a way. & It was something you couldn't mention. It's just another one of these oddities of which there are so many in North Korea," Chinoy said.
Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures
PWNED.
It looks like an alien penis.
Or, one of the Star Wars battleships.
I'll go with the latter.
Looks like a roller coster.
I thought this thread was about the Alamodome.
Hey it kept the Spurs here, so it served its purpose.
Looks like a line graph to me.
PWNED.
It looks like the headquarters of some evil super genious like Lex Luthor or something. I bet its full of deadly traps and sharks with lasers.
It looks so authoritarian. I'm surprised there aren't propaganda speakers and scrolling statements on it demanding your loyalty.
NK is nothing if not authoritarian.
If you get to travel there (very rare for americans) you get to go exactly nowhere without a handler. No casual driving down the road (no car rental period) or walking down the street to meet the common man (should you speak Korean). There is no such thing as an independent tour of NK, you go on a guided tour where you are told what you can and cannot take pictures of.
If you are a resident, you must wear a pin of Kim-Jong Il at all times. No excuses. And OBTW Kim-Il Sung is the president of NK. Don't let the fact that he's been dead years bother you.
Such a bizzare country that is...i just couldnt fathom that kind of life.
Kim Il-Sung is the real big brother. I've heard every single thing in North Korea was done by him or Kim Jong-Il. For instance, Kim Il-Sung personally planted the tree at the North/South Korean border that started this big conflict when the US cut it down. Kim Jong-Il personally drafted the designs for the Juche Tower.
I've heard Kim Il-Sung made bikes illegal in Pyongyang because he didn't want anyone leaving town. My step-grandmother fled from there, and will never go back to visit friends or family because she believes she'd be killed.
I think its ironic that North Korea would build a hotel of that size...considering how much tourism, or lack of, they get.
For anyone curious about life in North Korea, take a look at this.
http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums...ad.php?t=82755
Wow. Some of those pictures are insane.
That site is ing cool.
I can't see the pictures
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