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Nascent Drama

The firm has put glass panels into the concrete shell, installed telecommunications antennas -- 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 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 where 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,"
 
said Lee Sang Jun, a professor of architecture at Yonsei University in Seoul.
 
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 likeness of the hotel on postage stamps and boasted about the structure in official media.
 
According to intelligence sources, 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.
 
The North's main benefactor the 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
 
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