Kim Jong-il and the Hotel of Doom

Credit to Google Sightseeing for this photograph:


And a view from above if you're curious.

This building pretty much dwarfs everything else in Pyongyang. Once I saw how horrific-looking it was, I wanted to go to North Korea. Ryugyong Hotel is the tallest unoccupied building in the world -- and here I was, thinking it was the GM Renaissance Center in Detroit. Reuters reports:

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.

A little about the history of this monstrous edifice:

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."

All I'm wondering is when I'll be able to use the Priceline Negotiator to secure a room at this place. I know it has no windows right now, but I can hang some bedsheets up to keep the rain from blowing in. Do you think they'll have free WiFi? Or does the government not want me watching a streaming version of "Team America" while I'm visiting?

Another awesome view below -- notice how the building perfectly meshes with the skyline and doesn't seem out of place at all:


Here's the Pyongyang skyline -- what seems out of place?



Could it be that hideous 105 story, pyramid-shaped hotel to the far right? It's almost like a Highlights Magazine "What's wrong with this picture?" exercise. "That gorilla shouldn't be on top of the grandfather clock. And the dog should be drinking from his bowl - not the toilet! Oh wait, that is pretty normal ..."