The stranger than strange Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang, North Korea is one of the tallest unoccupied buildings in the world, and Englishman Simon Cockerell may be one of only two westerners to have ever been allowed inside.
Having visited the hermit state around 200 times through working as a tour guide, a personal connection helped Cockerell gain entry into the pyramid-shaped oddity. A series of photos he snapped inside the concrete behemoth, capturing its vast emptiness, have been shared with 9news.com.au.
Nicknamed by some the "Hotel of Doom" because of its curious mythology, Cockerell described the unique 330-metre tall structure as "very idiosyncratic, even for an idiosyncratic country".
Speaking on the phone from Toronto in Canada, Cockerell recalled his rare journey inside the hotel, travelling from the massive atrium base to the pointy top, and he also debunked some commonly misreported "facts" about the building, too.
What is certainly true is that the Ryugyong Hotel remains empty and abandoned. The tallest building in North Korea, originally designed to house 3000 hotel rooms, has never hosted a single guest.
A host of international media articles claim the building is 105-storeys, but that floor court is wrong, according to Cockerell.
The lift he rode to a breathtaking but flawed viewing platform at the very top, offering up "amazing" views over Pyongyang, stopped at number 99.
"It was a construction lift," Cockerell remembers, "a big sort of wooden box basically controlled by a lift operator."
There was no row of floor buttons to press.
"We just cranked it straight up and I remember it taking a very long time. That could have also been my anticipation, but it probably did take a very long time."
There was only space for one lift to reach the viewing platform, Cockerell said, because of the cone shape at the tower's apex.
"I did point out that the demand from people in the building to access this viewing platform would be huge, but the viewing platform is rather small," he said.
"There's no room there for a bar, there's no room for anything really. So it does seem that they haven't really thought about how popular that would be."
Whether that practical calculation ever matters is another thing, as the Ryugyong Hotel may never open.
Intended to showcase the ambition and power of North Korea, in response to South Korea winning the 1988 Olympic Games, the project ended up suffering prolonged interruptions and complications which threatened it from ever being topped out.
After construction kicked off in 1987, it took four decades for workers to finally complete the vision of Kim Jong Il, the deceased father of current ruler Kim Jong Un.
The fall of Soviet Union and the deterioration of the North Korean economy led to the abandonment of the project in 1992. The project was halted for 16 years and finally resumed construction in 2008.
Singapore-based architect Calvin Chua, an expert in North Korean urban design, told 9news.com.au, the hotel is "highly monumental" and has a commanding presence in Pyongyang, because of its size and pyramidal shape.
"It's extremely impressive," he said, "impressive in the sense of its scale."
The hotel had to be built in a pyramid shape, Chua explained, because North Korea had no access to affordable steel and therefore concrete was the only option.
"If you're building a skyscraper out of reinforced concrete, the only way for it to be stable is to design it in the shape of a pyramid."
The North Koreans dredged their rivers for raw materials for concrete production, but the process was expensive. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, Pyongyang lost a vital source of aid and investment. Construction ground to a halt.
Cockerell began running tours to North Korea with the company Koryo Tours in 2002 and was immediately fascinated by the shape of the unfinished building and its enormous concrete form framing.
"There is a kind of North Korean-ness about it," he said.
"I was constantly asking to visit it, mostly in jest actually, because I knew it wasn't ever going to be possible."
Ten years later, Cockerell met a North Korean who was working in China, and that man had the contacts necessary to arrange a visit.
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One day Cockerell eventually got a call saying the visit was on, but "it's North Korea so you never really get confirmation".
"The classic North Korean response is, 'Maybe some other time', which is a classic thing to say to people who only visit the country once. It's never confirmed until it literally happens," Cockerell said.
But sure enough, flanked by a colleague from his tour company and a small group of locals, he was escorted inside.
Behind the metal and glass cladding, which gave the building a kind of futuristic and retro feel all at once, there was a great nothingness.
There was concrete. Everywhere.
"It was bare," Cockerell said, describing immense concrete floor slabs, platforms and pillars, which were devoid of dust, "pretty clean" and "in fairly decent nick".
He explored three large cavernous lobby areas on the ground floor. Each of these three wings slopes skyward at a 75-degree angle, converging together to form the iconic conical top.
The viewing platform at the peak sits much higher than any other building in the city. But measuring 330-metres high, modest by today's standards, the hotel has slid outside the top-100 tallest buildings in the world.
No doubt a source of pain for the Kim dynasty, the impressive 554m Lotte World Tower in Seoul, South Korea, which was finished in 2017, dwarfs the Ryugyong Hotel.
The skyscraper in Seoul is the fifth tallest building in the world, around two-thirds the height of Dubai's Burj Khalifa, which stretches up 828 metres.
In 2012, it appeared German luxury hotel group Kempinski might move in to operate the Ryugyong, but they later backed down.
"Is there a need for hotel of that size? No," Cockerell said.
"Is it sensibly designed as a hotel? Clearly not," he added, pointing out the extreme costs of running a 3000 room hotel.
The building's narrowing shape also flies in the face of hotels wanting space for their highest-price rooms on the upper-most floors.
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Some media has portrayed the idea that North Koreans are embarrassed by the empty hotel or the length of time it took to finish, Cockerell said, "but I never found that to be true".
There were even claims that North Korea denied its existence and the government would airbrushed it out of city photos, he said.
"That's ludicrous, and never been true. Absolute nonsense. It used to appear on the front of books and magazines, even when it was an incomplete concrete shell with a crane up top. So that's complete rubbish. It was not a cause for embarrassment."
Cockerell said the Kim family simply put the blame on America, falsely explaining to the North Korean people that the delays were "the fault of jealous conspiracies" from outside Western powers.
Even though the hotel sits empty, officialdom is using it.
For several hours each night, the glass façade acts as a giant LED screen to project slogans and short videos to citizens of Pyongyang.
Chua, the architect, likened the Ryugyong display to a "propaganda screen or an advertisement screen".
Cockerell has also observed how Pyongyang locals interact with the structure.
"It's not like people sit on their balconies, watching the slogans go by.
It's just part of the nightlife. It's a futuristic building to North Koreans, very modern, unlike anything else."
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