North Korea Mystery Hotel

Pyongyang North Korea Hotel

The Mad Folly of North Korea 

Among the architectural curiosities of Asia, the winner of the modern age must surely be this extraordinary, failed hotel in North Korea, which I briefly discussed a few months ago, and has returned to notice from a few bloggers and websites.

The Ryugyong Hotel is, in my opinion, the single most unsettling structure ever erected by the hand of man. It's 1,082 feet tall, has 105 floors, and encloses 3.9 million square meters of floor space. And it is completely empty. It doesn't even have windows.

The North Korean government began construction of the building in 1987 at an estimated cost of $750 million, or 2% of the country's GDP. For comparison, 2% of the US GDP would be about $220 billion. Ryugyong was a massive undertaking for such a poor country.

Work was halted in 1992, and nobody knows exactly why. Some say that it was for financial reasons; the DPRK economy was a disaster even then, and 1992 was about the time that widespread famine and electricity shortages began to kick in. Others say that the building isn't structurally sound due to the use of poor-quality concrete, and that it literally cannot be completed. At one point it was rumored that the North Korean government was trying to raise foreign capital to pay for major structural renovations, so the truth might lie somewhere in between.

The Ryugyong Hotel looms over Pyongyang like some kind of slumbering bat. Something deep inside my brain tells me that the 75° angle of the hotel's outer walls is exactly the wrong angle; it says sinister, it says creepy, it says get away.

Okay, so tastes differ. I think it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up; maybe the North Koreans think it's sweet as punkin' pie. That still begs the question of why. The DPRK maintains strict control over tourists and other visitors. The Ryugyong was designed to have 3,000 rooms, but at the time it was built only a few thousand people were allowed into the country per year, and almost none of them were destined for Pyongyang. Even today, after the establishment of the Kŭmgang-san tourist region, the DPRK only sees about 130,000 tourists per year. Every single one of them could book a week-long stay in the Ryugyong and the hotel would still be significantly under capacity.

The same sense of pride that drove them to build the Ryugyong has driven the North Koreans to an almost pathological level of denial about the building. It's no longer on the city's maps. Guides claim not to know where it is. No one speaks of it. This state of affairs is made all the more surreal by the fact that the almost incomprehensibly massive Ryugyong is visible from every part of Pyongyang. It hangs over the horizon, never far out of sight. The ultimate expression of the idea of the elephant in the corner.

Shape of Days on North Korean Black Elephant

Some more commentary is provided by Cecil Adams over at this Straight Dope website, where he also talks briefly about the mad race for tall buildings in Asia and the lies told by the Malaysian government to claim their Petronas Towers as the tallest in the world - despite all the evidence that the Sears Towers were long the winners.

The North Koreans began constructing he pyramid-shaped Ryugyong in 1987, reportedly aiming for 105 stories to beat out a structure the South Koreans were building in Singapore (not Kuala Lumpur). With 3,000 rooms and an estimated cost of $750 million, the thing was strictly an ego trip for North Korea's rulers--Pyongyang's few existing hotels were, and are, virtually empty. In 1991, some time after the Ryugyong had been topped out, work halted for unknown reasons, though "out of money" would be a good guess. The 3.9-million-square-foot concrete structure is lit up at night, at least in propaganda pictures, but is thought to be crumbling.

Cecil Adams on the Ryugyong Hotel