Edited by Philipp Meuser

Essays by Ahn Chang-mo and Christian Posthofen

Ambitiously designed community buildings, faceless mass housing, developments, and a monumental emptiness are the defining features of Pyongyang - a city of three million inhabitants that is rising from the rubble to which the Korean War reduced it in the 1950s. This architectural guide to the capital of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea has two parts comprising a total of 368 pages. Volume 1 offers a selection of images and information on nearly one hundred buildings in Pyongyang, provided by the Pyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House, and presented here without further commentary. Volume 2 sets this material within its architectural and historical context.

The Architectural and Cultural Guide Pyongyang offers unprecedented insights into the capital of what is probably the most isolated country in the world, ruled in the third generation by a “first family” stubbornly upholding its own brand of stone-age communism.