Archinect - News

New photos depicting North Korea's 'Architecture of Control'

2024-05-20T18:41:00-04:00

Reuters has published images of the DPRK's showcase architecture in a new photo essay titled 'Architecture of control: North Korea's bizarre, post-modern cityscapes,' which shows a rare glimpse at the post-modern building activity in Pyongyang.

It comes as the state pursues a new building program meant to yield 50,000 new residences in the capital by about this time next year, an effort aided by labor from military academy cadets and meant to match its housing shortage at "Pyongyang Speed."

The architectural designers of most of these buildings remain unknown. Their likely source is the nearby Paektusan Academy of Architecture.

North Korea breaks ground on the next phase of its 50,000-unit development plan

2022-02-28T11:12:00-05:00

North Korea has started work on a sprawling 10,000-apartment residential project as the country embarks on a housing drive in its capital, Pyongyang. Though few design details have been disclosed, digital renderings of the development show towers rising on both sides of a leafy boulevard in an area of the capital called Hwasong. A larger skyscraper, which appears to be at least 40 stories tall, is also depicted in the plans.

North Korea says it is on track to develop some 50,000 new residences in the capital in phases within the next 2-3 years. The rogue state has faced considerable housing shortages in the past and now looks to rebound from two years of economically-stifled developmental setbacks to create a "new world of a prosperous power where the people enjoy the highest dignity and the best happiness."

Much of Pyongyang’s transformation into a “socialist fairyland” stems in large part from plans put forth in a 2016 directive from leader Kim Jung Un and developed mostly anonymously and at “Pyongyang Speed” by the Paektusan Academy of Architecture. The primacy of the construction push is being further underscored by the incorporation of laborers taken from the state’s various military academies, which are being leaned on for the first time in an attempt to overcome supply chain issues related to economic sanctions and a marked decline in trade with China.

North Korea's Kim Jong Un renews call for rapid housing construction

2021-04-06T20:15:00-04:00

Strict supervision over every construction process must be exercised, building materials economized in every way with high demand, accidents of all kinds prevented and excellent construction experience introduced...

Looks like bombs aren't the only things Kim Jong Un is building. And, aren't we more dynamite-centric on the subject matter?

Now that they have the know-how...

We will need to remember something we have *forgotten.

*Public housing.

South Korean construction companies expect big business in the north

2018-06-15T16:07:00-04:00

In the wake of the Singapore summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un, South Korean builders are planning for a flood of infrastructure projects in the northern half of the peninsula. The Construction Association of Korea plans to hold a forum for construction companies, research institutes and public entities on 25 June to discuss possible projects and funding arrangements.

While Koreans on both sides of the Military Demarcation Line appear increasingly hopeful in the wake of recent friendly diplomatic exchanges, it's the deep-pocketed South Korean industrial conglomerates that have started to map out the north's opportunities for development. Shares in Hyundai Asan, Daewoo Engineering & Construction, Samsung C&T, and retail giant Lotte are trending up.

Leaving Pyongyang: Photographer catches rare glimpse of life and architecture in North Korea's hinterland

2018-03-29T15:08:00-04:00

Leaving Pyongyang’s grand architecture, showcase avenues and spotless public spaces for the unvarnished reality of North Korea’s countryside is a sobering experience. Despite years of sanctions and increasing international isolation, Pyongyang looks wealthier in 2018 than I have ever seen it in 15 years of travel to the North. [...] But once the train rolls past the industrial belt around the capital, it’s a story of grinding poverty that clashes with the official image projected in Pyongyang.

Berlin-based travel writer Tom Masters gets the rare opportunity of a train ride from the bustling metropolis (by comparison) of Pyongyang through the northern backcountry of the secretive nation across the border to Vladivostok in Russia: "Every station along the way is almost identical, with two giant portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hanging on its exterior, both smiling incongruously against the bleakness of their surroundings."

Ryugyong and beyond: visiting Pyongyang's tourist hotels

2018-02-06T13:42:00-05:00

To suggest that its quarter-of-a-century presence in the rapidly expanding Pyongyang skyline merits the international mockery it has received—fatalistically nicknamed the “hotel of doom” by Western journalists, labeled an architectural sin, and deemed the biggest mystery in Pyongyang—would consign Ryugyong to the realm of compulsive political affect ranging from imaginative resentment to the very policies governing U.S.-North Korean relations since American involvement in the Korean War.

Jake Valente's piece for Failed Architecture takes a closer look at the small number of Pyongyang tourist hotels that visitors to North Korea's capital are constricted to. "When traveling to Pyongyang, one chooses between the Yanggakdo, Koryo, Sosan, Pothonggang, Haebangsan, Pyongyang, Ryanggang, and Youth Hotel, the eight hotels currently hosting foreigners."

Backed by Shigeru Ban and others, artist Jae-Eun Choi envisions garden-lined bridge for Korean DMZ

2017-12-28T21:07:00-05:00

At the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale, Ban and Choi presented a scale model of a 13-kilometer (about eight-mile), garden-lined bamboo walkway meandering between North and South Korea, elevated to protect visitors from ubiquitous DMZ landmines. Along its length would be towers for viewing nature and, every kilometer, open-air “Jung Ja” meditation pavilions designed by different architects and artists, including several reserved for North Koreans.

With support from Shigeru Ban and others, artist Jae-Eun Choi envisioned a garden-lined bridge called "Dreaming of Earth" that would meander through the Korean Demilitarized Zone, which has ironically grown into one of Asia's most significant wildlife sanctuaries. The initial proposal, which Choi and Ban presented at the 2016 Venice Biennale, includes designs by Olafur Eliasson and Sebastian Behmann, Bijoy Jain, Seung H-sang, Minsuk Cho, and artists like Lee Ufan and Lee Bul, Tadashi Kawamata, and more. Despite the current political climate, Choi is determined to make her peace project a reality.

China reportedly building refugee camps on North Korean border

2017-12-14T17:29:00-05:00

A Chinese county along the border with North Korea is constructing refugee camps intended to house thousands of migrants fleeing a possible crisis on the Korean Peninsula, according to an internal document that appears to have been leaked from China’s main state-owned telecommunications company.

The Times reports that one of China’s most prominent experts on North Korea called building the refugee camps “absolutely reasonable.”

North Korea dreams of an international tourist resort — at its missile launch site

2017-10-11T15:53:00-04:00

While headlines are dominated by escalating hostility between North Korea and the US, it has emerged that the Democratic People’s Republic has recently hatched plans to lure international tourists to a swanky new resort. The isolated regime of Kim Jong-un wants to turn the east coast city of Wonsan into “the Pearl of the East” to boost tourism, and hopes to attract $1.5bn in international investment for hotels, offices, apartments and an exhibition centre.

A different kind of logic applies to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un's planning strategy of turning the seaside city, and summer retreat, of Wonsan into a hot spot of international tourism — with luxury hotels, golf courses, sand beaches — AND maintain it as frequent launch site for the regime's (potentially nuclear warhead-carrying) missile arsenal.

Surge in bomb shelter sales as tensions with North Korea increase

2017-08-11T15:24:00-04:00

As tensions with North Korea flare in light of the news that they may have successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its missiles, everyone is scrambling to determine how seriously to take them.

Back in May, when North Korea began testing nuclear weapons with growing sophistication, Japan—vulnerable due to its proximity to North Korea and the fact that it hosts a number of U.S. military bases—saw a huge uptick in price inquiries on private nuclear shelters.

Tropical island-themed nuclear shelter in Japan

Now that the U.S. President has threatened the communist country "with fire and fury like the world has never seen" and Kim Jong-Un has shot back with threats of an attack on Guam, we are seeing a similar increase as those in areas like Guam or California that are at high-risk of being effected in the event of an attack look into extreme safety measures.

Bomb shelter on display, by Atlas Survival Shelters

In California, one company, Atlas Survival Shel...

Rumors circulate around world's largest unoccupied building in North Korea as the country tests its second missile

2017-08-01T16:21:00-04:00

For nearly 30 years, the 105-story tower has been a mystery. Located in Pyongyang, North Korea, the Ryugyong Hotel was billed to be the world's tallest hotel but has yet to host a guest, making it instead, the world's largest unoccupied building. But, on Friday, the country took down some walls around the construction area causing many to speculate that the building might finally open in the near future.

Dubbed the "Hotel of Doom" by Western media, the building broke ground way back in 1987, with construction expected to take only two years. An overly optimistic goal from the get-go, construction dragged on until 1992 when it was halted by a major economic crisis in North Korea caused by the fall of the Soviet Union. In 2008, construction on the hotel's exterior resumed with Egypt's Orascom Telecommunications Holdings injecting $30 million into the project. Upon completion of the buildings' exterior in 2011, the international mobile network company supported another $15 million to ...

What could go wrong? North Korean construction workers are being given crystal meth to finish projects faster

2016-08-12T14:13:00-04:00

project managers at a building site in North Korea’s capital Pyongyang are openly supplying their exhausted work force with powerful methamphetamines called “ice,” North Korean sources say. [...] Officials in charge of the project are pushing workers hard to finish frame construction on the buildings, which include a 70-story high-rise apartment building and at least 60 other structures, before the weather gets too cold, sources said.

The construction project in question appears to be Ryomyong Street, a so-called "Pyonghattan" for its giant scope and reportedly the country's tallest apartments. According to a report in Foreign Policy, the spread of methamphetamine (aka "ice") first began in North Korea during the 1990s, when it was being produced and sold as a medication.

Another speedy “Pyonghattan” skyscraper project is underway

2016-06-29T14:55:00-04:00

Hoping to show the world his country is doing just fine despite sanctions and outside pressure over its nuclear weapons program, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has put his soldier-builders to work on yet another major [skyscraper] project Pyongyang’s new Pyonghattan, officially called “Ryomyong Street,” is to have the country’s tallest apartment building, at 70 stories, along with a 50-story building and a handful of smaller ones in the 30-40 story range.

“[Kim's] soldier-builders are now putting up the frames for each new floor at the reportedly breakneck-pace of 14 hours to get it all done by the end of the year.”

Is Pyongyang's eccentric architecture only skin deep?

2016-05-20T14:09:00-04:00

Some Pyongyang-watchers believe the changes are merely skin deep, and do not portend or reflect deeper political or economic changes. ‘There is still all this state influence. There is no free development [...] The production of the city has not yet changed. Only the shapes of the buildings have changed.’ ‘There is this thing among North Koreans about developing...an architecture that is reflective of their society. So what is an architecture that reflects their society?‘

‘Pyongyang Speed:’ North Korea miraculously cranks out massive residential development for scientists in only one year

2015-12-18T13:46:00-05:00

North Korea held a ceremony on Tuesday to celebrate Mirae Scientists Street, the residential sector dedicated for scientists or engineers of North Korea. Mirae (“Future”) Scientists Street, located in the center of Pyongyang, directly next to Pyongyang Station adjacent to the Taedong River, is nearing completion. [...] Wednesday’s report emphasized the term “Pyongyang Speed,” the idea that North Korean workers can produce miraculously fast construction speeds.

"KCNA reports revealed that one of the buildings is 53 floors high, designed with an artistic exterior and guided under Kim Jong Un’s orders. The street also had a kindergarten, daycare center, school, stores, sports park and more, according to KCNA."

h/t CTBUH

Pyongyang's inner Wes Anderson shines through in its architecture, then and now

2015-11-03T13:24:00-05:00

'Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland,'...Throughout the city, you now encounter the recurring colour schemes of salmon and teal, or pink and baby blue...These new spaces look like they have been assembled from crisp, unreal planes of colour and exude an anaesthetising aesthetic, candy-coloured decoys that distract from a reality of mass poverty across the country.

Pyonghattan & water parks: North Korea's new architectural ambitions

2015-09-14T13:35:00-04:00

“Let us usher in a great golden age of construction,” exhorts one of the 310 official patriotic slogans published this year. The ambition is already evident in the number of cranes that dot the skyline [...]. The most prominent structures are the 47-storey shafts of the Changjon Street apartments, an 18-tower complex completed last year in less than 12 months and nicknamed “Pyonghattan” by foreign diplomats. But other emerging skyscrapers go undiscussed and unphotographed [...].

Related stories on Archinect and our sister site Bustler:

As bicycle ownership in North Korea rises, Pyongyang introduces bike lanes

2015-07-14T12:59:00-04:00

North Korea has installed cycle lanes on major thoroughfares in Pyongyang in an apparent bid to cut down on pedestrian accidents, as more residents are able to afford to buy bicycles. Bicycles are an expensive but increasingly popular mode of transport for many in the country where private car ownership, although on the rise, is still rare. [...] As recently as 2014, cycling was still illegal for women, though the ban was much flouted.

North Korean architect of new Pyongyang airport reportedly executed by Kim Jong Un

2015-06-29T13:31:00-04:00

North Korea's propaganda machine has spent days promoting a new airport in Pyongyang, showcasing the building's sleek glass walls and espresso stations. But the images, which feature Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, fail to mention that the building's principal designer was likely executed last year because Kim was unhappy with the design.

While the starving population of North Korea will likely never going to enjoy the airport's amenities (under the current circumstances), it has shown more direct feedback to other key-interest projects of the supreme despot, like the 46-story Taedong River Apartment Towers which remain unoccupied from floors 20 and up due to frequent power shortages and unreliable elevators.

North and South Korean archaeologists are working together to excavate Korea's medieval capital

2015-06-12T13:07:00-04:00

The site is located in Kaesong, the old imperial capital of medieval Korea, now a small industrial city located in North Korea, just north of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) dividing the Republic of Korea (ROK) and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). [...] “There were wars of nerves between South and North scholars due to differences in methodologies, but we were in a same boat on the achievement of this excavation.”

North Koreans hesitate to move into Kim Jong Un's shiny, new apartment towers

2015-06-03T15:39:00-04:00

Despite seeing completion last October, following orders from leader Kim Jong Un, only half of the units of a major apartment complex built near Pyongyang’s Taedong River are currently occupied. [...] “The elevator runs only during breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours, so for long spans of time it will be impossible to get to the 40th floor,” the source said. “There isn’t even a place for people to put their bicycles, which are the most fundamental tools for people’s livelihoods.”

NIMBYs go to court over "modern" home; Zaha gets an apology; global warming rages on: News Round-Up for August 25, 2014

2014-09-02T20:07:00-04:00

Friday, August 29:

MIT's MindRider helmet draws mental maps as you bike: The prototype is currently being used to create a mental-map and guidebook for NYC, and an upcoming Kickstarter campaign will attempt to fund the project for commercial sale.
In Beirut, a grassroots push for more grass: Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war made much of Beirut's green space inaccessible or dysfunctional. The Beirut Green Project is trying to bring at least a modicum of green space back to the city's residents.

Thursday, August 28:

Norwegian artists plan to open art academy in North Korea: Nothing's final yet, but the school is committed to its disbelief in sanctions or boycotts on art.
Alvar Aalto gets a close look from Google's Cultural Institute: Google's cameras go inside the famous Finnish architects studio, as well as a selection of his works, for a curated photo-exhibition.

Wednesday, August 27:

China considering drastic ban on coal: Chinese news outlets claim that work is underway to ban coal in Bei...

Norwegian artists plan to open art academy in North Korea

2014-08-28T13:20:00-04:00

The North Korean government has approved plans by two Norwegian artists to open an art academy in the country. Henrik Placht and Morten Traavik travelled to North Korea together for the first time in August to flesh out the proposal and to look for potential sponsors. So far they have received financial support from the Prince Claus Fund. [...] “One of the reasons for us going to North Korea is that we don’t believe in sanctions and the boycott of art,” Placht tells The Art Newspaper.

What The Future Looks Like To North Koreans Who Have Never Left

2014-07-28T17:47:00-04:00

[...] One of its latest projects: Inviting a North Korean architect to imagine the future of local design for travel. The Jetsons-style results include hovercraft hotel rooms and cone-shaped mountain villas connected by ski slopes. Nothing looks like it would be that out of place in a 1950s magazine, down to details like an old-fashioned rotary phone. This is what the future looks like to someone living in a place that's been cut off from the rest of the world since 1948.

The project Utopian Tours, initiated by English-born landscape architect turned Beijing-based North Korea tour operator Nick Bonner, was part of the Korean Peninsula’s “Crow’s Eye View” pavilion for the 2014 Venice Biennale (previously on Archinect).

Details into the Korean Peninsula’s “Crow’s Eye View” pavilion for the 2014 Venice Biennale

2014-05-27T20:29:00-04:00

In the Korean Peninsula's response to the 2014 Venice Biennale theme of rediscovering national identity through architecture, the "Crow's Eye View" pavilion explores the divided state of North and South Korea, and extends that discussion to the global state of architecture itself. The multi-themed pavilion uses architecture as a key to discovering new narratives of the peninsula's complex past, present, and future in an architectural and social perspective.

Find details of the pavilion on Bustler.

Related: A rare look at North Korean architecture, brought to you by non-Koreans

A rare look at North Korean architecture, brought to you by non-Koreans

2014-05-23T11:43:00-04:00

The Korea pavilion has been a part of the Venice Architecture Biennale since 1993, when the optimism of the post-Berlin Wall era made reunification between North and South Korea seem plausible. But getting equal representation from both Northern and Southern architects in 2014 has proved nearly impossible -- architects from the North would never seek individualized attention for their work, their practice entirely determined by guidelines set in stone by "Kim Jong-il's Architectural Theory".

Minsuk Cho, principal of Mass Studies in Seoul and the curator of Korea's 2014 pavilion, thought he'd have to give up on the idea of a joint North-South effort when communications with North Korea fizzled out, without explanation. This year's Biennale's theme, "Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014", is particularly relevant for Korea, considering both North and South remade their political and architectural landscapes after the Korean War, in the midst of mid-century modernism's development and the bi...

Lessons from North Korean urbanism, pt. 2

2014-01-10T14:56:00-05:00

I foresee that major urban spaces of Pyongyang, such as Kim Il Sung Square, will be used as “public” space with a greater variety of urban activities, such as commercial activities and show events. [...] The last thing that may happen in North Korea, or the thing that should not happen in some sense, is the Chinese model. Considering the scale of the economy and the potential of the North Korean market compared to China, it is hard to picture radical and massive urban development in Pyongyang.

Part two of NK News' interview with Dongwoo Yim pushes the discussion of North Korean urbanism into the future, comparing potential development methods to those seen in China and South Korea. Focusing on capital Pyongyang, Yim proposes a "Bilbao effect" development strategy that is heavy on catalytic architecture, and soft on strategy -- Pyongyang has very strict development restrictions that keep it from expanding, and will not be remodeling its mass-demonstration public spaces anytime soon.

Yim suggests that those spaces can be relevant in a post-dictatorship North Korea, and that they should be re-appropriated rather than razed for their history. How a hypothetical reunification with South Korea would look depends on how North Korean statehood is interpreted, as either autonomous or an infringement on South Korean land. But the prevailing lesson in Yim's interview is that Pyongyang is not going to be another Seoul, Guangzhou or Shenzhen, and will ultimately have to rely on it...

Lessons from North Korean urbanism

2014-01-08T15:43:00-05:00

They conceive of urban space as space owned by the public, not space for real estate development.

Much of the North Korean news that reaches the United States reads like tabloid hearsay, as glimpses of a totalitarian dictatorship rife with human rights violations are peeked through Dennis Rodman and military showboating. NK News, an independent and private news source based in Washington, D.C., is unique to both online journalism and treatment of its subject, in its rigorous and impressively connected focus on North Korean life and policy. Written from sources both in and out of the DPRK, NK News will most certainly get you to think differently about North Korea.

In part one of his interview with Dongwoo Yim, founder of the firm PRAUD and author of Pyongyang, and Pyongyang After, NK News' Academic / Research Director Gianluca Spezza takes a step back from current politics to ask Yim about the past and future of capital city Pyongyang's urban development. If Korea were to reunify, how would Pyongyang posture itself against Seoul, South Korea's megapolis capital?

Most of Nor...

Propaganda artists from North Korea paint a rose-tinted China

2013-10-21T12:15:00-04:00

A jovial group of Red Guards bask in the golden glow of cornfields, waving their flags at the magnificent harvest, while a rustic farming couple look on, carrying an overflowing basket of perfectly plump red apples. In the centre of this vision of optimism, where once might have beamed the cheerful face of Mao, stands the twisted loop of the China Central Television (CCTV) headquarters, radiating a lilac sheen.

The Beautiful Future sees icons of Beijing's skyline reimagined by a team of propaganda painters in Pyongyang

Revealed: Plans for North Korea’s new $200m international airport

2013-07-29T12:42:00-04:00

Architectural plans for a $200m airport on North Korea’s east coast have been made available to NK News by PLT, a Hong Kong-based architectural firm bidding to design what North Korea hopes will serve as a major transportation hub for the Kumgang Tourism Zone (KTZ).