It looks like a blog! But it isn't. This is a collection of pieces I have written for magazines. Mostly it looks like a blog because my technophilia is limited and I do not know how to do any better or different. If you do, email me.
Hello.
I'm a writer in New York. Work has appeared in Wallpaper*, CITY, Metropolis, Architectural Record, Architect, Architect's Newspaper, Surface, Interior Design, Print, Art + Auction, the New York Times, and the New York Times T: Style Magazine.
It's the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea, where the world's 22nd largest
skyscraper has been vacant for two decades and is likely to stay that
way ... forever.
A picture doesn't lie -- the
one-hundred-and-five-story Ryugyong Hotel is hideous, dominating the
Pyongyang skyline like some twisted North Korean version of
Cinderella's castle. Not that you would be able to tell from the
official government photos of the North Korean capital -- the hotel is
such an eyesore, the Communist regime routinely covers it up,
airbrushing it to make it look like it's open -- or Photoshopping or
cropping it out of pictures completely.
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.
