Pyongyang’s Infamous Ryugyong Hotel

Since foreign visitors to North Korea’s capital are so few (the airport has only one functioning runway), it is no surprise that those planning to stay a while have a narrow range of accommodations. There is the Koryo Hotel, the Sosan Hotel, the Ryanggang Hotel and half a dozen others, some fancy and some basic.

They cannot, however, register at the Ryugyong Hotel in the city’s Potong district. In existence for some 30 years, it has not yet had a single guest. Why? This is what Esquire magazine has called “the worst building in the history of mankind.” Other cruel descriptions are “the hotel of doom,” “the phantom hotel” and “a reminder of the totalitarian state’s thwarted ambition.” An architecture website ranked it the first of “seven architectural sins committed around the world.”

The 105-story, 3,000-room Ryugyong (meaning “capital of willows”) Hotel, 330 meters tall, is a three-sided skyscraper meant to resemble a rocket ship. As we have seen, it is the subject of international fascination and ridicule.  A hideous eyesore, it looms ominously over the city of three million.

The Ryugyong Hotel was the brainchild of Kim Il-sung. In 1987, he told Baekdoosan Architects & Engineers to design and build a large hotel catering to foreign businessmen and investors. (That is the official story. I surmise that all major decisions were made by his soon-to-be heir, Kim Jong-il. In 1991, he wrote a 170-page treatise entitled “On Architecture.” Peppered with Marxist-Leninist terminology, it asserted that public buildings must be “revolutionary” and avoid “decadent reactionary bourgeois” features. When the government realized that the Ryugyong Hotel was an uber-failure, it conveniently put the blame on so-called Baekdoosan Architects & Engineers.) Presumably off-limits to average citizens, it would have casinos, night clubs and lounges. There would be eight floors of revolving restaurants near the summit, and the world would be duly impressed. The initial budget was $750 million, much of that coming from the Soviet Union.

A completion date of 1989 was wildly optimistic. Problems abounded, the USSR collapsed, and soon the North Korean famine began. While the building technically topped out in 1992, it was far from complete. Nothing—plumbing or electrical wiring, for example—was done on the interior, and the exterior was raw concrete. As it was built on the cheap, the DPRK chose to forego a framework of reinforced steel. The elevator shafts are crooked and thus inoperable; the building is slowly crumbling, and experts see no feasible way of repairing it.

After 16 years of inactivity, the project was restarted in 2008. An Egyptian company called Orascom had signed a $400 million telecommunications deal with the government, on the condition that it agree to fix up the exterior of the Ryugyong Hotel. Windows and metal fixtures certainly improved the look. Later came construction of access roads, an entrance where stretch limos could theoretically pull up and dispense rich men and women, and a logo and signage in Korean and English. While still way out of scale and still empty, it no longer epitomizes architectural ugliness. It’s shiny, if nothing else.

The “hotel,” a fine example of the Kim regime’s disastrous economic model, was an embarrassment. The government sometimes airbrushed it out of Pyongyang photos, but who were they kidding? This gigantic, monolithic edifice dominated—and still does—the city’s skyline, dwarfing everything else.

As stated earlier, the Ryugyong Hotel has never had a single paying customer. A few people have moved in, however—homeless children. They play cat-and-mouse games with the police and find it better than life on the streets.

The North Koreans have, in their own way, come to embrace it. Fireworks shows started in 2009. And in April 2018, a large LED display featuring the North Korean flag was added at the top. That proved popular, so a computerized light show was implemented. Even on the coldest evenings, people come out to see the lights flash for three hours. It’s pure propaganda, of course: the history of the nation, homage to Juche and paeans to the three Kims.

Since a couple of my friends are architects, I asked them to assess the building’s merits. Dr. Victor Hugo Limpias Ortiz, dean of architecture at the Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz in Bolivia, said, “The Ryugyong Hotel is part of a long-established tradition in which religious, political or economic leaders aim to achieve social and historic prominence through a symbolic, gigantic structure. This North Korean tower is not great architecture by any means.”

And according to Jason Ralph Calloway, a retired architect at the University of Texas, “The Ryugyong Hotel must have been designed by an architect suffering from a bad hangover. As a whole, the design is clumsy and shows a lack of sophistication by Western standards.”