From ‘Ghost Tower' to ‘Hotel of Doom': Asia's abandoned skyscrapers
Towering skyscrapers often create a city's iconic skyline, yet sometimes its tallest buildings can fall into disrepair or remain unfinished.
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 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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