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Photo gallery: A visit to North Korea
So fascinatingly miserable.
The skyline of Pyongyang gives the impression of modernity at first glance. But many of the apartment buildings constructed in the run-up to the 100th birthday celebrations of Kim Il Sung are mere shells, lacking in sufficient water or electricity. This image shows the 105-storey Ryugyong Hotel.
Birthday celebrations for Kim Il Sung took place on April 15. This video still indicates the sheer scale of the event.
Even has several new apartment blocks have gone up in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang recently, many of them are practically unusable. This particular building bears an image of Kim Il Sung.
Traffic on the streets remains sparse outside of Pyongyang. But in the capital, there is an increasing number of cars on the roads, report foreigners living there.
North Koreans paying tribute to their late, great leaders Kim Il Sung on the left and his son Kim Jong Il on the right.
Re: Photo gallery: A visit to North Korea
I think the purpose was just an inside view to a place where we don't see much.
Well, it says in the captions that these buildings are basically unusable so there's that.
I read a book about North Korea a few months ago, Nothing to Envy, and it was horrible. I don't want to have to choose between North Korea and Somalia.
This article (review?) on the Ryugyung Hotel is pretty funny. Such hatred. From 2008.
(sorry for the long post)
http://www.esquire.com/the-side/DESIGN/hotel-of-doom-012808
A bootleg video of the tower from YouTube. How the brazen videographer escaped without being arrested remains a mystery.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.You may not be able to actually live there, but the building now has its own virtual real estate managers, Richard Dank and Andreas Gruber, a pair of German architects and self-described "custodians of the pyramid's diverse manifestations." The duo run Ryugyong.org, which they describe as an "experimental collaborative online architecture site." Sad you can't visit the building in real life? Log on, view the detailed 3-D models, and "claim" a subsection for yourself.
The Demolition S How video.The Demolition S How video by the Italian architects Extraneo might not be as conceptual as Ryugyong.org, but this piece of architectural porn sure is fun to watch. The video (which you can watch above) was mounted as part of the exhibition Fiction Pyongyang, curated in part by Stefano Boeri, who also collected 120 speculative designs for the hotel in the June 2006 domus magazine. The designs, he says, "have forced it to reveal its icy nature, its irresistible fascination as a fragile alien meteorite." The worst building in the world is also, we now know, "the only built piece of science fiction in the contemporary world." And it's true. Demolition S How is all Blade Runner-style flying ads and soaring concrete, and the video reminds us that the worst building in the world is the closest humans have come to building a Death Star.
Read more: http://www.esquire.com/the-side/DESIGN/hotel-of-doom-012808#ixzz1trMeuvL0
ETA: it cost the nation 2% of their GDP to build, per ryugyonghotel.com. Lol.