Giants in the Sky

Eat your heart out, Howard Roark.

Just as an aside, there’s a truly bizarre anomaly tucked in amongst all the iconic monuments to capitalism featured here. The 105 story Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea was started in 1987 but amazingly, is still unfinished. Now, after 16 years of inactivity, construction has resumed on the monstrous ziggurat — exactly why though is a rather puzzling mystery seeing that it’s structurally unsound due to the poor quality concrete and substandard materials used. Once dubbed “The Worst Building in the History of Mankind” by Esquire, the hotel is clearly visible from almost every vantage in Pyongyang, but even so has been removed by the government from all maps and is routinely airbrushed out of pictures.

Now if that isn’t an almost perfect metaphor for Communism, I don’t know what is.