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| China-Japan-Koreas |
| North Korea's "Hotel of Doom" wakes from its coma |
| 2008-07-18 |
North Korea's phantom hotel is stirring back to life. Once dubbed by Esquire magazine as "the worst building in the history of mankind," the 105-storey Ryugyong Hotel is back under construction after a 16-year lull in the capital of one of the world's most reclusive and destitute countries. According to foreign residents in Pyongyang, Egypt's Orascom group has recently begun refurbishing the top floors of the three-sided pyramid-shaped hotel whose 330-metre (1,083 ft) frame dominates the Pyongyang skyline. The firm has put glass panels into the concrete shell, installed telecommunications antennas -- even though the North forbids its citizens to own mobile phones -- and put up an artist's impression of what it will look like. An official with the group said its Orascom Telecom subsidiary was involved in the project but gave no details. The hotel consists of three wings rising at 75 degree angles capped by several floors arranged in rings supposed to hold five revolving restaurants and an observation deck. A creaky building crane has for years sat unused at the top of the 3,000-room hotel in a city where tourists are only occasionally allowed to visit. "It is not a beautiful design. It carries little iconic or monumental significance, but sheer muscular and massive presence," said Lee Sang Jun, a professor of architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul. The communist North started construction in 1987, in a possible fit of jealousy at South Korea, which was about to host the 1988 Summer Olympics and show off to the world the success of its rapidly developing economy. A concrete shell built by North Korea's Paektu Mountain Architects & Engineers emerged over the next few years. A proud North Korea put a likeness of the hotel on postage stamps and boasted about the structure in official media. According to intelligence sources, then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung saw the hotel as a symbol of his big dreams for the state he founded, while his son and current leader Kim Jong-il was a driving force in its construction. But by 1992, worked was halted. The North's main benefactor the Soviet Union had dissolved a year earlier and funding for the hotel had vanished. For a time, the North airbrushed images of the Ryugyong Hotel from photographs. As the North's economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s the empty shell became a symbol of the country's failure, earning nicknames "Hotel of Doom" and "Phantom Hotel." Yonsei's Lee and other architects said there were questions raised about whether the hotel was structurally sound and a few believed completing the structure could cause it to collapse. It would cost up to $2 billion to finish the Ryugyong Hotel and make it safe, according to estimates in South Korean media. That is equivalent to about 10 percent of the North's annual economic output. Bwahahahaha! Looooosers! Maybe you could grind it into dust and feed 10% of your population with it. Bruno Giberti, associate head of California Polytechnic State University's Department of Architecture, said the project was typical of what has been produced recently in many cities trying to show their emerging wealth by constructing gigantic edifices that were not related in scale to anything else around them. "If this is the worst building in the world, the runners up are in Vegas and Shanghai," said Giberti. Yeah, well I'll bet the runners-up at least have occupants. |
| Posted by:gorb |
| #9 One day, giant sirens will lift from the structure and shriek into the sky, and the Eloi will stop whatever they're doing, and stumble, mesmerized, into the lobby. And then the massive doors will shut... |
| Posted by: Angie Schultz 2008-07-18 17:09 |
| #8 From In From the Cold... In fairness, we should note that the unfinished hotel has served at least one useful, though unintended, purpose. U.S. military sensor operators, supporting U-2 surveillance missions against North Korea, routinely used the Ryugyong as a “focus point” for tuning the optical and radar sensors on the spy plane. Even at extreme ranges, it was easy to use the 105-story hotel as a target for the U-2’s sensor pods, and ensure they were working properly. It wasn’t what Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-il had in mind when they conceived the project, but the Ryugyong’s role as an “aim point” may be its most lasting contribution in relations between North Korea, the ROK and the United States. |
| Posted by: tu3031 2008-07-18 16:44 |
| #7 Well the Norks never claimed to be arbiters of good taste. |
| Posted by: Snerelet Untervehr4255 2008-07-18 16:27 |
| #6 Visit North Korea. http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1456276825 |
| Posted by: Newc 2008-07-18 15:58 |
| #5 If it doesn't collapse under its own weight that is. |
| Posted by: Jairong Oppressor of the Poles6195 2008-07-18 15:49 |
| #4 fwiw, the architect was Baekdu Mountain Architects & Engineers. there is a rumor that the upper floors are being retrofitted with either a communications facility or some other similar thing |
| Posted by: mhw 2008-07-18 11:11 |
| #3 |
| Posted by: Abdominal Snowman 2008-07-18 09:28 |
| #2 It would cost up to $2 billion to finish the Ryugyong Hotel and make it safe, according to estimates in South Korean media. They sound like Big Dig subcontractors... |
| Posted by: Raj 2008-07-18 08:46 |
#1 The Ryugyong Hotel is, in my opinion, the single most unsettling structure ever erected by the hand of man. ItÂ’s 1,082 feet tall, has 105 floors, and encloses 3.9 million square feet of floor space. . . . --"Shape of Days" |
| Posted by: Mike 2008-07-18 07:55 |