anthonyasael posted a photo:
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anthonyasael posted a photo:
Support our children programs through Art in All of Us
www.anthonyasael.com
Photos of ALL 192 countries
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anthonyasael posted a photo:
Support our children programs through Art in All of Us
www.anthonyasael.com
Photos of ALL 192 countries
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anthonyasael posted a photo:
Support our children programs through Art in All of Us
www.anthonyasael.com
Photos of ALL 192 countries
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jourtor posted a photo:
jourtor posted a photo:
Kwangmyong (meaning "Bright", also the name of the North Korean Intranet), made in DPRK.
jourtor posted a photo:
jourtor posted a photo:
jourtor posted a photo:
Eric Lafforgue posted a photo:
The Mangyongdae Schoolchildren’s Palace was opened in 1989 as a “comprehensive extracurricular educational center for schoolchildren.” says the official speech . It consists of an eight-story central building and various annex buildings totaling over 1,108,000 sq. ft. / 103,000 sq. m. The annexes house a science block, an art block, a gymnasium, an indoor swimming pool and a 2,000 seat theater. There are 700 rooms for various purposes including music and dance practice rooms, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, computer science, automotive, machine tool, sports, etc.
Over 12,000 pupils visit the palace each day, cared for by over 500 teachers and several hundred more lecturers and assistants.It is located in Pyongyang
© Eric Lafforgue
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Eric Lafforgue posted a photo:
Once i took the picture, they asked me to come with them and took a picture al together. Perhaps one day i will see this picture on Flickr...perhaps...
This kind of moment which is not planned in the tour always make the guides nervous!
© Eric Lafforgue
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Kernbeisser posted a photo:
평양 정오동.
Only a few metres behind the impressive high-rise buildings of Tongil Street, North Korea shows its true face.
Kernbeisser posted a photo:
adaptorplug posted a photo:
The Ryugyong Hotel February 2010.
Which will be the world's tallest hotel, only two years from its completion date....
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North Koreans revamp 'world's worst building'
The Independent. Friday, 18 July 2008
by Jon Herskovitz in Seoul
A hotel in Pyongyang once described as "the worst building in the history of mankind" is back under construction after a 16-year break.
According to foreign residents, the Egyptian conglomerate Orascom has just begun refurbishing the top floors of the pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel, whose 330m (1,083ft) frame dominates the skyline of the capital of North Korea, which is one of the world's most reclusive and destitute countries.
The firm has put glass panels into the concrete shell, installed telecommunications antennae – even though the North forbids its citizens to own mobile phones – and put up an artist's impression of what it will look like. An official with the group said its Orascom Telecom subsidiary was involved in the project, but gave no details. The hotel consists of three wings rising at 75-degree angles capped by several floors arranged in rings, which are supposed to hold five revolving restaurants and an observation deck. A creaky building crane has for years sat unused at the top of the 3,000-room hotel in a city that tourists are only occasionally allowed to visit.
"It is not a beautiful design. It carries little iconic or monumental significance, but sheer muscular and massive presence," Lee Sang Jun, a professor of architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul, South Korea, said.
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 and show off to the world the success of its rapidly-developing economy. A concrete shell built by North Korea's Paektu Mountain Architects & Engineers emerged over the next few years. A proud North Korea put a picture of the hotel on postage stamps and boasted about the structure in the state media.
According to intelligence sources, the then North Korean leader, Kim Il-sung, saw the hotel as a symbol of his big dreams for the state he founded, while his son and current leader, Kim Jong-il, was a driving force in its construction. But by 1992, work was halted. The North's main benefactor, the former Soviet Union, had dissolved a year earlier and funding for the hotel had vanished. For a time, the North airbrushed images of the Ryugyong Hotel from photographs. As the North's economy took a deeper turn for the worse in the 1990s, the empty shell became a symbol of the country's failure, earning the nicknames "Hotel of Doom" and "Phantom Hotel".
Mr Lee and other architects said there were questions raised about whether the hotel was structurally sound, and a few believed completing the structure could cause it to collapse.
It would cost up to $2bn (£1bn) to finish the Ryugyong Hotel and make it safe, according to estimates in South Korea's media. That is equivalent to about 10 per cent of the North's annual economic output. Bruno Giberti, the associate head of California Polytechnic State University's department of architecture, said the project was typical of what has been produced recently by many cities which were trying to show their emerging wealth by constructing gigantic edifices that were not related in scale to anything else around them.
Mr Giberti, when asked about Esquire magazine's comment about the hotel, said: "If this is the worst building in the world, the runners-up are in [Las] Vegas and Shanghai."
This photograph sits in a set DPRK Architecture and a collection here.
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