Ryugyong Hotel
Baikdoosan Architects & Engineers · Pyongyang, North Korea
The Ryugyong Hotel is a 105-story pyramidal tower formed by three tapering wings meeting at a circular upper section. Construction began in 1987 and the concrete structure topped out in 1992, but work stopped for many years before exterior glazing and envelope works resumed in the 2000s. Despite its completed exterior appearance, the building has never opened as the hotel originally intended. The tower dominates Pyongyang’s skyline and is architecturally significant as an extreme example of late socialist monumental ambition, unfinished megaproject construction and the difficulty of mapping a conventional completion date onto a building with such a prolonged history.