As some of you saw on yahoo! yesterday, in downtown Pyongyang, the capital of communist North Korea, there rises a building of true distinction; it was hard for me to take my eyes off the picture. It looks ominous in the background, towering over and dwarfing the other buildings, totally abandoned and hallow inside. How can anyone construct such an eyesore without completion and then simply let it remain? I bet it sucks a lot of positive energy out of the city. Pity the people of this country.

The Ryugyong Hotel, or so says Esquire’s Eva Hagberg:

Even by Communist standards, the 3,000-room hotel is hideously ugly, a series of three gray 328-foot long concrete wings shaped into a steep pyramid. With 75 degree sides that rise to an apex of 1,083 feet, the Hotel of Doom (also known as the Phantom Hotel and the Phantom Pyramid) isn’t the just the worst designed building in the world — it’s the worst-built building, too. In 1987, Baikdoosan Architects and Engineers put its first shovel into the ground and more than twenty years later, after North Korea poured more than two percent of its gross domestic product to building this monster, the hotel remains unoccupied, unopened, and unfinished. Construction was halted in 1992.