The Ryugyong Hotel with its 3,000 rooms and seven revolving restaurants should be the largest hotel and one of the tallest building in the world. It has, however, been left uncompleted for more than fifteen years, due to lack of good quality concrete coupled with financial problems. With the hotel standing 330 m tall, Pyongyang‘s skyline is marked forever by this rough concrete construction, the first structure over 100 floors built outside the United States. Photo by: wordthecat

What has become a ghost tower was intended as a showpiece to demonstrate North Korea‘s power and grandeur to the world. Composed of three vertical triangular wings, assembled in a ”Y” shape, the construction pierces the landscape like an arrow. Despite its modernity, the hotel’s massive form and eerie ruination makes it look more like an ancient pyramid than a twentieth-century skyscraper. Photo by: Kernbeisser

The style is neither High Tech nor Postmodern. It is somewhere between Brutalism and Constructivism, seen through the lenses of an Orwellian dimensions. It could be viewed  as symbolic of North Korea‘s many thousands of anonymous individuals. Nowadays, Ryugyong Hotel, its surrounding gardens and facilities, and the $750 million it tool to get it to this stage are slowly deteriorating in front of the eyes of Pyongyang’s inhabitants. Photo by: Pricey