From Thailand’s ‘Ghost Tower’ to Pyongyang’s ‘Hotel of Doom’: Asia’s abandoned skyscrapers

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From Thailand’s ‘Ghost Tower’ to Pyongyang’s ‘Hotel of Doom’: Asia’s abandoned skyscrapers
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From Thailand’s ‘Ghost Tower’ to Pyongyang’s ‘Hotel of Doom’: Asia’s abandoned skyscrapers

By Business Insider

Published: 2:32pm, 17 Feb 2025Updated: 2:33pm, 17 Feb 2025

Towering skyscrapers often create a city’s iconic skyline, yet sometimes its tallest buildings can fall into disrepair or remain unfinished.

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While abandoned structures can become symbolic of a location’s financial or social struggles, cities still have to decide what to do with them. Some are left to rust, others are demolished – and a few become revitalised.

“A lot of these buildings can still have a lot of life left in them,” said Shawn Ursini, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat’s senior building database manager. “We just maybe need to get a bit more creative as to what their purpose is going forward.”

Here are some of the skyscrapers around Asia that now sit empty or uncompleted – and how they ended up that way.

Unattached toilets sit in an open room in the empty Sathorn Unique building in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2017. Photo: AP
Unattached toilets sit in an open room in the empty Sathorn Unique building in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2017. Photo: AP

Sathorn Unique, Bangkok

Popularly known as Thailand’s “Ghost Tower”, this looming structure dates back to 1990. The 47-floor building was only 80 per cent finished when the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit.

  

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