A 330-meter neo-futurist pyramid dominates the Pyongyang skyline, and for over a decade it stood as a windowless concrete shell that the North Korean government airbrushed out of photographs and left off official maps. This deep dive tells the story of the Ryugyong Hotel, from its 1987 groundbreaking as a response to a South Korean firm completing the world's tallest hotel in Singapore, through the planned 1992 opening timed to Kim Il-sung's 80th birthday, to the collapse of Soviet subsidies that froze construction and left a rusting crane at the summit for 16 years.

We explain why the pyramid shape was dictated by concrete rather than steel, how freeze-thaw spalling and differential settlement reportedly warped the structure and its elevator shafts, and why an estimated $750 million cost represented roughly two percent of North Korea's GDP ...