Pyongyang

Following the architectural guidelines of the socialist countries, the architecture of North Ko-rea has been formally classified either as architecture of socialist realism or of socialist modernism, with the particularity of the two formal systems coexisting over the years in re-sponse to the official ideological discourse. Studies of socialist architecture have rarely in-cluded postmodernism until the fall of the Berlin Wall, identifying the appearance of the neo-historicist or technologically inspired forms with the restoration of capitalism, as an opposi-tion to reduced forms (colours and materials) of socialist modernism. In this sense, the ar-chitecture of North Korea produced after 1989 -- i.e. since the construction related with the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students in Pyongyang -- remains in a kind of conceptual limbo: still maintaining the socialist character as well as carefully chosen historicist refer-ences according to the prescriptions of the Juche theory.

Postmodernism appears in Western architecture starting from the 1970s, claiming historical references and the expression of relationship between the building and its physical and so-cial context. However, the use of these references is rational and depends on a specific narrative; therefore the theorist Robert Venturi introduces concepts like "irony" or "double meaning" in the analyses of architectural works (Venturi et al 1972). The connecting line between socialist realism (as defined by Boris Groys, 1992) and postmodernism refers to this rational and industrial use of traditional forms, traced by Romanian historian and theorist of architecture Augustin Ioan (1999) and more recently by Rem Koolhaas in one of his lec-tures on Russian architecture (2014).

The article investigates the post-modern nature of North Korean architecture of the last twenty-five years and relates it to similar examples from Russia, China, and the former So-viet republics of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan where the newly built capital cities have fol-lowed the representative trend of Pyongyang.