jack’s musings

I’ve always had a sort of strange fascination with urban design in other world cultures. That combined with an (un)healthy obsession with Google Earth has allowed me to explore the Ryugyoung Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea, one of my favorite urban disasters, in much greater detail. I’d like to try and project some of my horror/amazement onto you.

The Ryungyong Hotel was originally designed to be a 1,083 ft, 5 star, mega luxury hotel in the capital city of the DPRK. The 3.9 million square foot hotel was to feature over 3,000 rooms, 7 rotating restaurants at its peak, and 6 more stationary floors above that. The original thought by the DPRK was that this hotel with 75 degree sloping sides would serve as a springboard to allow foreign investors to toss money into the country. However one might immediately notice that this entire paragraph was composed in the past tense.

Construction on the tower was started in 1987 by Baekdu Mountain Architects & Engineers (read: Kim Il-Sung), but it was abandoned in 1992. The building consists only of its concrete shell and a looming tower crane at it’s peak that serves as a reminder of its desertion. The hotel features no lighting, no plumbing, no electricity, and certainly no guests. Even in it’s uncompleted state, it’s taller than most buildings in the United States and would have been the 7th largest building in the world at the time of its completion. (Currently it’s the 22nd tallest building in the world.) It’s by far the tallest building in North Korea, and it can be clearly seen from most parts of Pyongyang.

The building itself is a national embarrassment. However for reasons of either pride or cost, the structure has yet to be demolished. However perhaps the DPRK is simply waiting for nature to take its course. It’s widely believed that the cement in the concrete of the building is defective. What few reports there are of the building indicate that it’s crumbling and is destined to collapse.

Architecturally the building is simply horrendous as well. It’s clearly the result of some DPRK ministry unfamiliar with building design and not that of an architect. It looks almost like a sort of North Korean response to brutalist buildings that were popular in decades past. I’ve never liked brutalism, but at least past examples have some sort of architectural thought behind them as opposed to this sand castle-esque pile of concrete. Esquire went so far as to call the building as the “The Worst Building in the History of Mankind.”

Obviously the building was a financial disaster as well. While no financial records have even been released, it has been estimated by Japanese newspapers that the final cost of the hotel would have been around $750 million, or two percent of North Korea’s GDP. This extravagant spending combined with a stagnating economy at the time is believed to have helped worsen the mass famine in the country during the 1990s.

The country’s “solution” to the failed hotel is also uniquely North Korean. The country has a national eyesore that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is easily seen throughout the city, and is a complete and total failure. So what’s the solution? Pretend it doesn’t exist. You’ll find the building on no maps, no guides, and no pictures of the city. Additionally, residents are very hesitant to even mention its existence even though they can clearly see it from wherever they are in the city.

However, in many ways the building serves as a metaphor for life in the DPRK. It’s a failure that no one talks about, it’s a crumbling shell, a financial disaster, not in-touch with the outside world, under construction, abandoned, etc. The connections just go on and on. However perhaps this mass of metaphors may make the building an architectural landmark. It might inadvertently have become the only honest, symbolic structure in the entire DPRK. Maybe that’s why I like it so much, it’s just ironic.

And I’m not the only one who has a strange fascination with this building as well. German architects Richard Dank and Andreas Gruber have started a conceptual website at www.ryungyong.org that allows visitors to explore and “claim” their own space in the structure. Additionally, an Italian design firm named Extraneo (makers of this disturbing-on-many-levels iPod skin) created this video below entitled “Demolition S How.” Your guess is as good as mine as to what it means, however both of these links show my amazement is not unique.

Though I have to wonder. If it falls down, how long will it be before anyone outside of Pyongyang figures it out?