Consider the Environment
While we’ve blogged about green design and the importance of environmental considerations in project design and construction, today I’d like to focus on designing to the environment. What do I mean by that? First, take a look at the Ryugyong Hotel in North Korea.
Critics of this project have said that the designers of this hotel project didn’t take the surrounding environment of Pyongyang into consideration. No other buildings, at least in the picture in the Esquire article, come within 75 stories of this structure. The concrete wings that comprise the base and main structure of the hotel extend 328 feet from the center. One gets the sense that this hotel was supposed to be some kind of symbol for the North Korean capital. And it does serve a symbolic purpose, though not the one the North Korean government had envisioned. Now the hotel serves as an expensive reminder of poor planning and designing for design’s sake.
Started in 1987, construction costs of the hotel have totaled more than 2% of North Korea’s gross domestic product, and construction isn’t even complete. Construction stopped in 1992 and hasn’t resumed since. (Take a look at the very top of the tower. That’s a construction crane nestled atop the building, presumably there since 1992.) According to the Esquire article, rumors abound that the North Korean government either ran out of money or that the building was engineered incorrectly from the start and can never be occupied. In other words, the project is a complete failure. But even if construction was completed and there were no engineering mistakes, the hotel is still an abject lesson in the importance of design professionals taking a project’s surrounding environment as well as the ability of the local labor force and the availability of building materials into consideration when beginning design.
