Projects That Never Finish

Key concepts

Every work — at a glance

• La Sagrada Família — Antoni Gaudí (building)

  A vast Gothic–Art Nouveau basilica in Barcelona, under construction since 1882 — the world's longest active building project, designed by Gaudí to take generations ('my client is not in a hurry').

• Nusantara Capital City — Indonesia (megaproject)

  Indonesia's planned new capital in East Kalimantan — a 'green, digital' moonshot championed by President Jokowi, whose cranes fell idle after he left office and his successor lost interest.

• Ryugyong Hotel — North Korea (building)

  A 105-story pyramid-shaped hotel in Pyongyang, begun in 1987 and left a hollow concrete shell for decades, earning the nickname 'Hotel of Doom'.

• Wonderland Amusement Park — China (megaproject)

  A would-be theme park near Beijing, abandoned mid-construction, its half-built fairy-tale castle left rusting in farm fields for years before demolition.

• Berlin Brandenburg Airport — Germany (megaproject)

  Germany's flagship airport, which opened roughly nine years late after fire-safety failures, planning blunders, and cost overruns — a notorious embarrassment for a country famed for efficiency.

• Milan Cathedral — Italy (building)

  The Duomo of Milan, whose construction stretched across roughly six centuries before completion.

• Crazy Horse Memorial — Korczak Ziolkowski (monument)

  A colossal mountain carving in South Dakota honoring the Lakota leader Crazy Horse, begun in 1948 and still unfinished over 70 years later — now controversial, as a non-Native family has profited from it.

• The Fire in the Crypt (case)

  In 1936, during the Spanish Civil War, anarchists set fire to the Sagrada Família's crypt and partly destroyed Gaudí's plans, which then had to be rebuilt.

• Cranes, Computers and CNC Stone (technology)

  Tower cranes, computer models and machine-cut stone sped the Sagrada Família up so much that its structure is due in 2026, a century after Gaudí died.

• A Symbolic Capital — Prabowo Subianto (case)

  Indonesia's new president cut Nusantara's budget by more than half and called it a 'symbolic capital': a project left to fade, never cancelled.

• The Administrative Island (concept)

  The economists' warning about Nusantara: capitals built from scratch, like Brasília and Naypyidaw, often become islands of government cut off from the economy.

• Go Slowly, So You Do It Right — Korczak Ziolkowski (quotation)

  Korczak Ziolkowski expected the Crazy Horse carving to take 30 years; seventy-one years after he began, it was still far from finished.

• The Red Man Has Great Heroes Also — Henry Standing Bear (quotation)

  The 1939 letter in which the Lakota elder Henry Standing Bear asked for a Native American memorial to answer Mount Rushmore.

• One non-Indian Family — Jim Bradford (case)

  The charge that the Crazy Horse Memorial became a family business: $12.5 million taken in 2018, and 'one non-Indian family has become millionaires'.

What to know

1. 01
   What did these delays have in common? Not bad luck but structure. The economist Bent Flyvbjerg found megaprojects almost always run over on two forces: optimism bias (planners genuinely underestimate difficulty) and strategic misrepresentation (they lowball costs to win approval). Add scope that keeps growing, funding gaps, and leaders who move on — and chronic delay becomes the predictable result of how big builds get sold. The Crazy Horse Memorial, begun in 1948 and still unfinished, is the pattern at its extreme.
2. 02
   Unfinished isn't always failure — the Sagrada Família and Milan Cathedral were conceived as generational works where slowness is the point, so the examples split into cautionary disasters and patient masterpieces.

Across subjects