Behold, the Worst Building Ever

The Ryugyong Hotel in downtown Pyongyang is surely one of the worst architectural failures in history, Eva Hagberg writes in Esquire: Not only has the 105-story building—which sucked up an estimated 2% of North Korea’s annual GDP from 1987 to '92—never opened, but the pyramidal “hotel of doom” is such an eyesore that the government routinely edits it out of official skyline photos.

Without official explanation, rumors have it that either the 3,000 room project was out of money when construction ceased in 1992, or it  was incorrectly designed and is unsafe for occupation. "Imagine," Hagberg writes, "if the John Hancock Center (1,127 feet tall) in Chicago was not only completely vacant, but unfinished with zero hope of ever being completed." (More buildings stories.)