…as “The Worst Building in the History of Mankind.” (h/t Marginal Revolution) Excerpts below:
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.
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.
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.
What is most interesting is that a group of German architechts is already speculating on projects to revitalize the site.
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.
And of course, no story on the Ryugyong is complete without the “Demolitoin S How” video, which shows how the Ryugyong’s dominance of the Pyongyang skyline might make it valuable as a good bill board platform in the future:
The video [which you can watch by clicking on the image 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 (archives here). 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.
Other information:
Ryugyong Wikipedia page
Ryugyong photo (showing the base)
Full Article:
The Worst Building in the History of Mankind
Esquire Magazine
Eva Hagberg
1/28/2008
