Worst Building is on the Wall of Shame

This week while China was in the limelight with its ‘blue box beating with a green heart’- the Water Cube ‘National Aquatics Centre in Beijing’, Korea’s one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel got a severe blow in the architecture world. It was declared the ‘worst building ever’. Esquire says ‘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’

Q-Who are the architects of this building?

A-Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers. The building was started in 1987. Construction stopped in 1992 since North Korea ran out of money.

Esquire continues, ‘ 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.’

This 22nd highest skyscraper in the world is a failure on an enormous scale. Sad you cannot visit the building in real life, but you sure can visit its ‘ experimental collaborative online architecture site’ as it is called by its virtual real estate managers at http://ryugyong.org/!

The video shown below was part of the Fiction Pyongyang exhibition of June 2006.