Ryugyong hotel being completed?

Not PC describes it as the worst building in the world. Wikipedia tells about its abortive history. The building that looks like a shard of glass has fallen from the sky or shot itself out of the ground.

However, someone has decided to upgrade it. Egyptian company Orascom is refurbishing it to make it a tower for cellular phone service. Quite how many customers it expects for the phones or the hotels is a mystery especially since most citizens are not permitted a private phone (for obvious reasons), and tourism is rather low. So now we have pictures of it being clad in glass (right).

Scaffolding at the top presumably to allow telecommunications equipment to be installed. Although the rusty crane that has been at the top for around 20 years appears to be there (imagine the worker who was in there - and had to get down).

It has been described as the worst property investment ever by the Times. It apparently will be finished by 2012, which tells me either Orascom knows something nobody else does, or it has far too much money.

"World's worst building" getting minor upgrade

Not PC described it as such, as has the Daily Telegraph and Esquire magazine.

It's the Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, which is itself an empty shell. It is a concrete monstrosity, it has no utilities or rooms. Construction started in 1987 as a showpiece against South Korea, the host of the 1988 Olympics (which the USSR and China, North Korea's then allies, refused to boycott), construction stalled in 1992 after US$750 million had been spent on it, and the aid flows from the USSR (and the USSR itself) had disappeared.

According to the Daily Telegraph, a handful of top floors are to be refurbished at considerable cost. I wonder how this will happen, given it has no elevators and rumour has it that it was so badly designed and built (by North Korean state "companies") that the elevator shafts are not plumb (so elevators are out of the question using those.

The reports of "refurbishment" are most likely to be the use of the structure for telecommunications according to the Daily Telegraph report. This is surely the building that would be one of the first to get demolished when this enslaved country is finally freed.