Ryugyong Hotel, Pyongyang: The 105-Story — and Never-Opened — ‘Hotel of Doom’

The Ryugyong Hotel is a 330-meter, 105-story pyramidal tower that dominates the skyline of Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. Begun in 1987 as a Cold War prestige project, it was intended to be the tallest hotel in the world and one of the tallest buildings on Earth at the time. Construction on the colossal concrete frame reached close to its structural top-out before work halted in 1992, and the building then stood as a raw, windowless concrete shell — cranes left frozen at its summit — for roughly sixteen years.

The tower’s distinctive three-winged pyramid form, angled at 75 degrees and crowned by a cluster that was meant to hold revolving restaurants and observation decks, made it unmistakable from across the city. Yet for most of its existence it has been an icon of incompletion rather than of luxury, earning the nickname the ‘Hotel of Doom’ among foreign observers who watched it sit empty year after year. Foreign guidebooks and photographers long airbrushed the unfinished structure out of official images, while the regime declined to acknowledge the stalled state of its flagship building.

Exterior work finally resumed in 2008, when Egypt’s Orascom — which was simultaneously building North Korea’s mobile-telephone network — began cladding the facade in glass and metal panels. The reflective glass skin was completed around 2011, transforming the bare grey shell into a gleaming mirrored pyramid. In 2018 a vast LED display was mounted across one of the building’s faces, turning the tower into a giant illuminated propaganda screen for nighttime light shows.

Despite the finished exterior and the spectacle of its light displays, the Ryugyong Hotel has never opened to guests. As of 2025 there are no operating hotel rooms, no functioning interior fit-out reported, and the building has hosted neither tourists nor business travelers in nearly four decades since work began — a finished-looking facade wrapped around an unfinished and unused interior.