By Julie Makinen / Los Angeles Times/TNS
PYONGYANG, North Korea—Soaring more than 50 stories, the new blue-and-white skyscraper at the top of Future Science Street cuts a Jetsons-like form. Its tower is crowned with a golden planet, and its sleek tiers of stacked oblong shapes call to mind a cartoon spaceport, ready to dock flying saucers.
Down the block, two dozen other new apartment and commercial buildings in bold hues of orange and green, and adorned with celestial logos glow brightly in the night, their sail-shaped façades reflected in the ripples of the Taedong River.
Downstream half a mile, a sleek metallic-and-glass group of buildings rise from Ssuk Island in the shape of a huge atom. Dubbed the Sci-Tech Complex, the campus, opened last fall, houses an electronic library, reading areas and an “earthquake experience room,” and boasts of heating and cooling systems powered by solar, geothermal and other green-energy sources.
For decades, North Korea’s capital has been seen by outsiders as a city frozen in time, with its Soviet-style squares, giant monuments, brutalist apartment blocks and ubiquitous propaganda billboards earning it appellations like “the world’s best-preserved open-air museum of socialist architecture,” and “the city that globalization forgot.”
Striking makeover
NEARLY wiped out during the Korean War in the 1950s, Pyongyang was rebuilt in subsequent decades as a sort of model socialist city, with drab, imposing buildings and a significant amount of green space. It was hardly known for being architecturally interesting.
But despite continued international sanctions and economic lethargy, supreme leader Kim Jong Un is giving the city a striking makeover that’s flooding its once-drab streets with color, loosening its formal vibe and even adding a smidgen of whimsy, while offering both residents and visitors myriad new opportunities for leisure, pleasure and consumption. Since inheriting the reins of power in late 2011, the Swiss-educated Kim has largely eschewed the kind of grand arches, obelisks and statues and hulking government palaces that were the pet projects of his father and grandfather, Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung. Instead, the young leader has ordered up the construction of water parks, amusement parks, skating rinks, a dolphinarium and a ski resort.
New residential districts, including Future Science Street and Satellite Scientist Street, boast amenities such as health clubs, pizza parlors and coffee shops. A shooting range opened in 2014 in central Pyongyang, while the more sedate can enjoy an excursion on the Rainbow, a 1,230-seat, 393-foot river cruiser that launched last October with a revolving restaurant on the third and fourth floors.
Skin deep
DOTTING the main thoroughfares are new snack kiosks, many of them plain, prefab sheds, but a few shaped like animals. On the city’s outskirts, a new glass-and-metal airport terminal welcomes travelers with gift shops and duty-free stores selling Remy Martin cognac and Marlboros.
“There’s been a huge amount of construction from 2010 onward. The city is much more built up than when I first visited, in 2008, and the pace of development is much faster,” said Calvin Chua, a Singapore-based architect who has been running urban development and design workshops in North Korea since 2013 via a group called Choson Exchange.
In almost any other city, such shifts in the skyline would typically be regarded as the unremarkable result of routine cycles in the real-estate market. But parsing the meaning of such changes in a long-insular communist state, where architecture and urban planning have been tightly yoked with ideology for seven decades, is less straightforward.
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. There is not a free market. It’s all ruled by the state vision of what North Korea can look like,” said Philipp Meuser, a German architect who, in 2012, published the two-volume Architectural and Cultural Guide Pyongyang.
“The production of the city has not yet changed. Only the shapes of the buildings have changed.”
Much of the construction is still accomplished in the old way—with labor from the military or youth “shock brigades.” The main material—concrete—is locally sourced.
But Chua has noted the apparent rise of what he calls “nonstate entities” getting involved in North Korean building projects. In the last few years, North Korea has enacted new laws supposedly aimed at protecting foreign investors and establishing special economic zones.
Soviet-style
SINCE 2013, the state-run Korean Central News Agency has published multiple stories detailing projects involving architects and builders from China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia, the Middle East and Africa. The city of Wonson has urged overseas investors to come develop there.
“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? In the 1970s and 1980s, it was a reinterpretation of [traditional] Korean architecture—things like tile roofs and columns” being added to Soviet-style neoclassic designs, Chua said. “Today the interpretation is much more open-ended. That is something we are still trying to find out from them.”
If North Korea has its own Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid, it’s not saying—few of its buildings are credited to individual designers because architecture (like most things in the country) belongs “to the people.” But Pyongyang design—past, present and future—is increasingly attracting the attention of foreign architects, critics and hobbyists.
A year after Meuser published his book, travel company Koryo Tours launched architecture-focused tours of Pyongyang and has put out several issues of a magazine focused on the city’s iconic buildings. Chua, the Singapore architect, conducted a workshop last year in Pyongyang in conjunction with London’s Architectural Assn. and is returning in August for another focused on sustainable design.
Crying demand
NICK Bonner, founder of Koryo Tours, even organized an exhibit at Venice’s 2014 Architecture Biennale, commissioning a North Korean architect to envision new structures for the ever-larger numbers of tourists flocking to the country. The result was a hand-drawn Technicolor dreamscape of conical, solar-powered mountain hotels linked by slides, cantilevered Frank Lloyd Wright-esque villas and tree-shaped retreats where visitors travel via helicopter-hovercraft.
Despite all the construction taking place, one project Kim has yet to complete is the massive, pyramidal Ryugyong Hotel. The 105-story concrete colossus, begun in 1987, has been called the “worst building in the history of mankind” by Esquire and “a luxury hotel designed for Mordor” by Lonely Planet. It still looms unoccupied over the city, though an Egyptian telecom company seeking business dealings in North Korea did foot the bill for a glass exterior a few years ago.
For Kim, the Ryugyong may be a painful reminder of the danger of overreaching on massive, iconic projects that do little to please the populace.
And besides, the city is so stuffed with monuments, there’s not exactly a crying demand for more.
“The symbolistic architecture is not needed in the moment,” Meuser said. “So they did the water park, and the ski resort because they have to entertain the people.”