“Postmodern Pyongyang: North Korea's Transformations through its Changing Built Environment”

North Korea is often seen as a country stuck in a Stalinist time-warp, no more so than in its architecture, which is usually considered an architecture of socialist realism little changed since the early days of the Cold War. In fact, North Korea's urban landscape has evolved in numerous ways over the last several decades. Although still under one-party rule and therefore not (yet) "post-socialist," North Korea's transformations are parallel to those of former socialist countries of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with which North Korea has maintained close connections throughout the regime's existence. North Korean architecture since 1989 - the year Pyongyang hosted the 13th World Festival of Youth and Students, as well as the year the Berlin Wall fell - can be characterized as "socialist postmodernism," still dictated by the directives of the central state yet surprisingly resonant with both Western postmodernism and post-socialist trends in the former Soviet Union and China.

Reception to follow.

Sponsored by the East Asian Studies Program