Ryugyong Hotel Exterior Completed

Architizer News

Ryugyong Hotel Exterior Completed

July 22, 2011

It only took 20 years or so, but the exterior of the massive North Korean Ryugyong Hotel has been completed. The hotel, which is pyramidal in form with walls that slope at a 75-degree angle, has long been lampooned as brute and permanent evidence of the totalitarian government’s deficiencies. At 330 meters (1,100 feet) tall, the “phantom pyramid” stood over a decade and a half unfinished, without windows or interior walls, looming ominously over the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. Several economic factors, not the least of which was the fall of the Soviet Union, disrupted construction, which has ceased until 2008, when Egyptian conglomerate Orascom Group (creepy website, right?) invested $400 million dollars to restart the project. Click for more.

With its surfaces now completed, the hotel has taken on a completely different aesthetic, shirking its brutalist frame for a glossy vision of a jet-age mecca, with all the shallow optimism of ’80s technocratic utopias. As we mentioned before, it’s funny, if not embarrassing how much the hotel resembles Renzo Piano’s new Shard in London. The hotel is scheduled for completion in 2012 to coincide with the anniversary of the birth of North Korea’s “eternal president” Kim Il-Sung, but it is readily acknowledged that construction may continue beyond that point. The hotel will have 3,o00 rooms and at least 5 revolving restaurants.