RFI: Ryugyong hotel

where is it?

Pete Doherty interview on Newsnight, tonight.

Which, uh, does not contain a reference to said hotel.

http://shapeofdays.typepad.com/the_shape_of_days/2004/09/the_ryugyong_ho_1.html

I fucking LOVE this crazy hotel.

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/skward2/simon/large/dprk/hotel105.jpg

http://www.londonbridgetower.com/images/building/view_from_thames.jpg

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/north-koreans-revamp-worlds-worst-building-870858.html

Is there really that much surplus capital in the world, or is Pyongyang just getting a head start on post-communist disaster tourism?

Either way, I wanna visit!

while the american housing market collapses, the north koreans boom. it is a sad, sorry reversal of fortune.

Wow, that thinkg looks crazy. Nothing like post-Maoist state monumentalism, I guess.

Mr Giberti, when asked about Esquire magazine's comment about the hotel, said: "If this is the worst building in the world, the runners-up are in (Las) Vegas and Shanghai."

Like that theyhad to add the (las) just in case you were thinking he meant Johnny Vegas or something.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/90/Dprk_pyongyang_hotel_rugen_05_s.jpg

unnnng I am so obsessed with this building

Wait so they're allowed to admit that it's there now?

http://www.theage.com.au/travel/travel-news/worst-building-in-the-history-of-mankind-gets-a-face-lift-20090907-fdbs.html

'Worst building in the history of mankind' gets a face lift'

http://images.theage.com.au/2009/09/07/717165/Ryugyong-Worst-Hotel-Korea-420x0.jpg

I love this. And only on one side! It doesn't get any better.

it reminds me of jaws now. it looks like a huge shark opening its mouth.

Ha, it kind of does!

It's all so weird: how can there possibly be that many wealthy elite in NK to even stay at such a place. Tourists cant visit... wtf would they do with this place.

if this dude visited The North he would stay there for sure

http://www.aquateencentral.com/images/characters/Oglethorpe.jpg

i got the impression (either from reading or my own imagination) that no one stays there and it's not a functioning hotel

oh you probably meant like, if it was finished and opened. dur.

surely all the elite already live in Pyongyang and thus have no use for a hotel there? And they only let in very few foreigners. It is pure distilled folly.

I've always loved that the North Korean arc de triomphe was deliberately built slightly larger than the one in Paris.

I read something that suggests they started this building in the first place out of spite/jealousy when Seoul got the Olympics. If that's true, it is hilarious.

Every time this thread gets revived I expect to read that this thing has fallen over.

It now looks like some kind of insane space laser thing. Maybe Kim Jong-Il's been building the ultimate weapon for years right under everyone's noses.

Oh god, now I'm gonna wonder that forever! :|

But by 1992, work was halted. The North's main benefactor the Soviet Union had dissolved the previous year and funding for the hotel dried up.

I'm guessing this place was intended for visiting Russian dignitaries and the like. Maybe they can turn it into a prison now?

This is definitely not the worst building in the history of mankind.

- Looks ugly as hell
- Unfinished and would be largely useless even if it were finished
- Constructed at great cost when its population are starving

Is pretty bad surely? I mean, at least the Swindon Travelodge or something has a use.

All but one of the top 10 results for 'worst building in the world' are this hotel. The other is for this:

http://www.donquijote.org/album/photos/album/barcelona_el_torre_agbar.jpg

torre agbar?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/92/Torre_agbar_leds.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Torre-agbar-nit.jpg/800px-Torre-agbar-nit.jpg

I actually really like Torre Agbar, although it does look amusing with that construction ring on.

politics aside I love the look of the Ryugyong hotel; it literally (visually?) looks like a Blade Runner pyramid

http://www.nknews.org/2012/09/finally-first-pics-inside-the-ryugyong-north-koreas-skyscraper-we-thought-theyd-never-finish/

INSIDE AT LAST

Hahah you just beat me to it.

surely all the elite already live in Pyongyang and thus have no use for a hotel there? And they only let in very few foreigners. It is pure distilled folly.

when i was in dalian, a client of our company did business in north korea and it was interesting to hear his stories going to korea for business (rather than the trip lots of tourists get to go on: mass games + guided tour + pictures of a field that they drove by).

he stayed here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yanggakdo_International_Hotel

it has a revolving restaurant, a casino, and a massage parlor

and there's also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koryo_hotel

not to say that building massive hotels in pyongyang is not a slightly crazy idea.

my friend made the very apropos comment that the ryugyong hotel looks like a protoss nexus

Work resumed in 2008 after heavy investment from Egypt’s Orascom group, who are also responsible and heavily invested in North Korea’s mobile telephone industry.

Orascom are some bold dudes

there are officially a million (or close enough) mobile network subscribers in north korea + a huge market in smuggled phones + chinese phones/service from up north. the "hermit kingdom" story overlooks stuff like that: real reforms on shit like telecom (despite the occasional story about cellphones or whatever being suddenly banned in nk), the existence of a thriving grey/black market esp for shit like phones, the ways that normal nk citizens game the stalinist bureaucracy (like The source reported, “Cell phone traders purchase cell phones using their families’ and relatives’ names,” because only one handset per person is allowed., massive unofficial crossborder trade with china.

betting on the mobile phone market in north korea, the neighbor of the biggest mobile phone markets in the world, isn't a longshot.

i always wondered how this works: my china unicom service dies the second i enter hong kong from shenzhen, the exact second i walk over the yellow line to the customs/immigration guy. but people in north korea can get service from chinese cell providers?

http://www.asiapress.org/rimjingang/english/002C/index.html

Along the North Korean border with China, signals from Chinese mobile phone networks reach into North Korea. The official and legal North Korean mobile phone network requires registration with officials and systematically locks out all international incoming and outgoing calls. Chinese phones using Chinese carriers, however, allow international calling. Given this, possession of Chinese mobile phones is illegal.

a million subscribers! I had no idea.

ya dude

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/21/uk-korea-north-cellphone-idUSLNE7AK01C20111121

Secretive North Korea is expected to register the 1 millionth cellphone user on its new 3G network by the end of the year, barely four years after people were thrown into prison camps, or possibly even executed, for owning one. -- but doesn't elaborate on prison camps, which often function, in the case of econ or minor polit crimes as a place where people with money to pay are shaken down for what they can pay then sent on their way.

"All the waitresses in coffee shops have them, as one example, and use them. Let's not even talk about businessmen. The are never off them, and conversations are frequently interrupted by mobile calls."

north korea is FUCKED obv but this kind of stuff is an interesting counterpoint to the easy narrative of hermit kingdom / nuclear brinksmanship / abandoned protoss nexus hotel aghast lols.

don't want to be captain save-a-hotel here. the whole enterprise is weird and tragic, construction halted at the onset of a famine that would go on to kill half a million or more. but maybe too much time in east asia has inured me to thumb-in-eye excessive hideous architecture. across the yalu, there's more than enough fucked up ugly crumbling monumental development built for spurious reasons with questionable funding, idling with cranes parked in front.

i guess my point is something about the perceived wackiness of north korea (serious journalists and everyone else falls for this). and using shit like ryugyong hotel to illustrate it. i dunno. it's like the story of sakoku japan and commodore perry forcing it open-- but there was international trade and exchange all along. japan might have been closed to the dutch, for example, but trade continued thru intermediaries like the ryukyu kingdom or tsushima, and nk might not be importing south korean cultural artifacts and, according to reuters, killing people for having cellphones but there are plenty of people in pyongyang watching vcds of south korean sitcoms and reading bibles and chatting to relatives in liaoning on their chinese phones. i guess if you go beyond that narrative of hermit kingdom weirdness, it um gets less weird.

yeah the lolnorthkorea stuff does seem in poor taste sometimes, in light of the suffering there.

There's a lot more Stalinist cruelty and paranoia than there is wackiness.

that girl hannah led the trip i went on this summer. she's great.

posted these to ilp already but some pics in the first two sets if anyone's interested: http://ihardlyknowher.com/kdfo/sets

the scuttlebutt i heard, don't know if it's true, is that in the 15 or whatever years of halted construction, the exposed structure was damaged or worn to the point that it might not even be safe enough to really occupy. idk.

it was also one of the few things that our NK tour guide presented in a pretty clear-eyed (not blaming the US/Japan/SK) way: basically we started to build it, we had a famine and so had to divert the little money that was available to other places, but now the economy is doing better so we have finished it and we are v proud of it, go us.

picture i took of it this summer:

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7117/7740685050_3ede2f9f14_c.jpg

Awesome photos, rent.

thanks!

Yeah a mate of mine went on a guided NK tour about a year ago, I think I mentioned before. I loved his pics, so many giant communist statues. So few people around. So much herding of westerners to the very few nice places - they wenrt to what I think was like, a burger king or subway - the only one in the whole country?

god, i wish i was in north korea.

really dug your picturs, bgi man

god, i wish i was in north korea.

Things one never really expects to see written.

man, it looks like something from the sky city in the old flash gordon