Architecture for the Masses

(2014)

IN THE SPRINGTIME, Pyongyang is shrouded in a pale mist that gives the city an enchanted and ethereal quality. For a moment, especially when dawn breaks over the city and the sun becomes a distant perfect golden circle in the sky, you can almost forget that you’re in the capital of the most hermetic country on the planet. Such moments of reflection are few and far between—after all, you are never really alone here. The mandatory guided tours, the only possible means of traveling in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, may seem an imposition to free-spirited travelers used to doing their own thing on their own schedule, though after a day or two, the routine of being herded and directed begins to make sense as the logical modus operandi in a country where everything is strictly regulated and “under control.”

It was the third week in April—spring break back in the Western world—when I joined the “Architecture for the Masses” expedition to the North Korean cities of Pyongyang and Kaesong offered by Koryo Tours, a Beijing-based, British-owned company specializing in travel to the Hermit Kingdom. Accompanied by Soviet film and architecture historian Daniel Levitsky and Koryo’s Simon Cockerell, a DPRK expert who has visited the country more than 130 times, I was promised that we would be granted access to buildings that had been closed to foreigners on my previous two trips to the country in 2012. As the itinerary was to coincide with Kim Il Sung’s birthday, the DPRK’s biggest national holiday, the city was flush with festivities, ranging from the annual Pyongyang Marathon, the twenty-ninth Spring Friendship Art Festival, mass dances, an international Juche study group convention, and the Kimilsungia-Kimjongilia Flower Exhibition.

Of course, there was no chance of entering what is perhaps the country’s most iconic building (and perhaps even the inspiration for London’s the Shard?)—the 105-story pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel, which has been unfinished since construction began in 1987. (Cockerell, together with Koryo’s Hannah Barraclough, became the first foreigners to get a hardhat tour of the interior in late 2012. While the exterior of the building is finally complete, their photos revealed that the inside remains largely an empty shell.) The closest we got was a trip to the rarely visited Jongbo Centre annex, located directly behind it. We gained entry to the building under the pretext of refreshing ourselves at the Centre’s tiny, creepily dark bar. The Centre was, in its prime (the late 1970s/early 1980s), a highfalutin hotel and hangout spot for the Pyongyang elite; today, despite the sterile veneer elicited by its polished marble floors, its few remaining patrons are those of an age that are able to remember it in its prime—the premises were largely empty save for a middle-aged couple engaged in an enthusiastic game of Ping-Pong beside the empty bar, its former hotel rooms used as offices by local banks.