The Ryugyong Hotel: ‘The Worst Building in the History of Mankind’?

Longtime World Hum readers will be familiar with the Ryugyong Hotel, a sad icon of North Korea. “It’s a hotel that stands 105 floors, has 3,700 rooms and is crowned with five revolving restaurants,” we wrote in 2005. “No one has ever stayed in it. In fact, it has stood derelict since 1989.” Esquire recently dubbed the building the worst in the history of mankind.

Eva Hagberg writes:

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 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.

A german duo has built a 3D model of the Ryugyong, and some video of the hotel apparently smuggled out of North Korea has popped up on YouTube:

Esquire has a pretty good argument. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of a strong challenger for world’s worst building. Anyone else?

 

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