It would be a good place to relocate UN Headquarters.
Posted on 01/31/2008 10:14:49 PM PST by americanophile
A picture doesn't lie -- the one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up, airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or cropping it out of pictures completely.
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.
(Excerpt) Read more at esquire.com ...
Wow. That picture makes me dizzy.
Although, technically speaking, The Needle is not really a building. I just can't help taking a pot-shot at it whenever the opportunity arises.
I first heard about it a couple of years ago. The thing is an eyesore even for a Stalinist regime. Rumours are that the building is not stable; imagine that thing starting to crumble.
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. After all, who the hell travels to beautiful downtown Pyongyang? It would make sense if the hotel were in South Korea, where Americans are allowed to travel and where projects like the Busan Lotte Tower and the Lotte Super Tower now rise thousands of feet above the formerly modest skyline.
With Pyongyang’s official population said to range between 2.5 million and 3.8 million (official numbers are not made available by the North Korean government), the Ryugyong Hotel — the 22nd largest skyscraper in the world — is a failure on an enormous scale. To put it in context, imagine if the John Hancock Center (1,127 feet tall) in Chicago (population 2.9 million) was not only completely vacant, but unfinished with zero hope of ever being completed
Fine.
Let’s hit it with a JDAM. Eyesores need to go.
Kind of looks like a sci-fi space ship with a lot of windows.
No problem. There’s probably so much sand in the cement that it’ll melt in the first hard rain. Wonder how many people Lil’ Kim had shot over this fiasco?
Build it and they will come.
Lil Kim must be so ronery.
When that thing does come crashing down (possibly from one too many pigeon droppings), the amount of dust and debris will be dreadful. Folks in the area will think that it is snowing concrete and rebar.
Maybe it was intended to house Kim’s concubines and porn collection.
I support that idea wholeheartedly. One failure to house another.
Is Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers the same outfit that Boston contracted to do The Big Dig?
No...wait...The Big Dig did get finished.
Didn't it?
Or is it still caving in?
Oops. Rebar?
Worse than this?
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=490
Read the comments if you want to know why Hillary will be our next president.
That's how most people see the US these days.
The Concrete Doublewide Trailer (the Clinton library). It does generate a lot of negative air pressure.
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