Nascent Drama

[The Dork Lord]

The firm has put glass panels into the concrete shell, installed telecommunications antennas -- even though the North forbids

 

[The Dork Lord]

its citizens to own mobile phones -- and put up an artist's impression of what it will look like.

 

[The Dork Lord]

An official with the group said its Orascom Telecom subsidiary

 

[The Dork Lord]

was involved in the project but gave no details.

 

[The Dork Lord]

The hotel consists of three wings rising at 75 degree angles capped by several floors

 

[The Dork Lord]

arranged in rings supposed to hold five revolving restaurants and an observation deck.

 

[The Dork Lord]

A creaky building crane has for years sat unused at the top of the

 

[The Dork Lord]

3,000-room hotel in a city where tourists are only occasionally allowed to visit.

 

[The Dork Lord]

"It is not a beautiful design. It carries little iconic or monumental significance, but sheer muscular and massive presence,"

 

[The Dork Lord]

said Lee Sang Jun, a professor of architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul.

 

[The Dork Lord]

The communist North started construction in 1987, in a possible fit of jealousy at South Korea, which was about to host the 1988 Summer Olympics

 

[The Dork Lord]

and show off to the world the success of its rapidly developing economy.

 

[The Dork Lord]

A concrete shell built by North Korea's Paektu Mountain Architects & Engineers emerged over the next few years.

 

[The Dork Lord]

A proud North Korea put a likeness of the hotel on postage stamps and boasted about the structure in official media.

 

[The Dork Lord]

According to intelligence sources, then North Korean leader Kim Il-sung saw the hotel as a symbol of his big dreams for the state he founded,

 

[The Dork Lord]

while his son and current leader Kim Jong-il was a driving force in its construction.

 

[The Dork Lord]

But by 1992, worked was halted.

 

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The North's main benefactor the Soviet Union had dissolved a year earlier and funding for the hotel had vanished.

 

[The Dork Lord]

For a time, the North airbrushed images of the Ryugyong Hotel from photographs.

 

[The Dork Lord]

As the North's economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s the empty shell became