The Ryugyong Hotel

The Ryugyong Hotel

Here's an excerpt from a really terrific post over at The Shape Of Days:

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.

By the way, it's the pointy building in the background.

Comments

[MR.COM]

THINK---

www.WISDOM-mr.com

[michael paul]

It just shows what a bunch of nutcases North Korea's government is. They have an obese leader who builds massive projects spending millions of the tax payers' money and the people are starving. Take some good looks at Pyongyang. It's virtually deserted. If you see satellite photos of Korea at night you'll notice all the lights from South Korea, and virtually none in the North. This is a country run by a fat, selfish, baby of a leader who has no concern for his own people...only his ego. I'm so glad President Bush called it like it was...North Korea is part of the axis of evil. The government is supposed to be for the people, not the other way around.

[michael paul]

It just shows what a bunch of nutcases North Korea's government is. They have an obese leader (I use this term in jest) who builds massive projects spending millions of the tax payers' money and the people are starving and in abject poverty. Take some good looks at Pyongyang. It's virtually deserted. It's just a toy for Kim Jong Ill, or whatever his name is, bought with the blood and bodies of his own fellow countrymen. If you see satellite photos of Korea at night you'll notice all the lights from South Korea, and virtually none in the North. This is a country run by a fat, selfish, baby who has no concern for his own people...only his ego. I'm so glad President Bush called it like it was...North Korea is part of the axis of evil. The government is supposed to be for the people, not the other way around.

[hotel]

http://hotel.nimb.ru

[Rummij]

I agree that DPRK is a horrible place where really ghastly things happen, but man you have to realise how traumatised the population was, and still is, as a result of the Japanese occupation in the Second World War and the subsequent Korean War. If you look into the history of the horrible things that happened in Korea during this period you can partly see why they are so paranoid and insanely focused on social cohesion and national conformity.

Kim Jong Il was born in a Soviet military camp in 1942, where his old man was fighting the Japanese. It's hard to imagine the hardship and sacrifice that people of those generations endured. You have to also remember that when contstruction on the Ryugyong Hotel started in 1987, South Korea was still a horribly opressive military dictatorship that the North and indeed the whole world was quite rightly fearful of.

The Ryugyong Hotel was undoubtedly a gargantuan penis extension for Kim Il Sung, but it seems it was also a genuine attempt to attract foreign investment and open up the country to the outside world. Unfortunately for the people of the PDRK it was a catastrophic failure.

It is the saddest and spookiest monolith on the planet.

Let's hope for the PDRK's sake they find a way to transition to a market economy and some semblance of peace and prosperity, without having to be annihilated yet again.