B04 074 Review4/Pyong/Sus ph:B08 70/rev3/ki/sd/ta
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ARCHITECTURAL AND CULTURAL GUIDE PYONGYANG
The Juche Tower monument, in the foreground, stands 170m above the river Taedong in Pyongyang
German architect and publisher Philipp Meuser describes Pyongyang, the North Korean psycho regime’s capital, as ‘arguably the world’s bestpreserved open-air museum of socialist architecture’. This publication offers a solid armchair trip through it. Volume 1 has photographs and descriptions furnished by the official Pyongyang Foreign Publishing House, without critical comment, but Volume 2 includes critical and analytical essays. Best to leave the latter at home if you’re planning a trip. South Korean architectural historian Ahn Chang-mo comprehensively charts the development of Pyongyang from before its destruction in the 19501953 Korean War. He says that the architecture of Pyongyang is ‘completely different’ from that of other socialist states, but anyone who has wandered along, say, Berlin’s KarlMarx-Allee, would instantly recognise the stolid heroic architecture set in wide, windswept spaces. The spaces are wider in Pyongyang, Ahn explains, to reduce damage in war, and he highlights how North Korean architecture diverged from Soviet styles. From the Sixties, traditional
BOOK
AESTHETICS OF SUSTAINABILITY Edited by Sang Lee 010 Uitgeverij, £32 Review by Thomas Wensing “Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture” is a worthwhile collection of essays that explores sustainability as it relates to architecture and aesthetics. The many writers, including Sang Lee, Kenneth Frampton, Kengo Kuma, Matthias Sauerbruch and Louisa Hutton, and more left of field like Ralph L Knowles, raise pertinent questions about the state and status of sustainability and its concomitant aesthetic development. Lee’s opening essay takes stock of the situation and asks whether sustainability has fundamentally changed architectural discourse and if sustainability has become an intrinsic part of the architectural profession. Despite many inspiring individual examples BLUEPRINT APRIL 2012
MEUSER/DOM PUBLISHERS
Edited by Philipp Meuser DOM Publishers, £31.90 Review by Herbert Wright
Korean elements and typologies were encouraged, coinciding with founding dictator Kim Il-Sung’s unique political philosophy, Juche. From the Eighties international influences are absorbed. This contextualises works like the 170m-high granite Juche Tower monument to the Ryugyong Hotel, long an unfinished shell whose very existence locals denied, despite its 330m height. Only now is this concrete rocket-cum-pyramid being completed, with new glass cladding. Christian Posthafen’s essay ‘on the Legibility of Spatial Production’ is somewhat less illuminating, stuck in the arcane vagaries of philosophers
of sustainable and energy neutral architecture, the profession has not yet been able to design for a world in which sustainability is a lived principle, instead of a catch-phrase. Lee and many of the contributors expose the intrinsic hypocrisy in what is currently understood as ‘sustainable development’. To Lee the real barrier to addressing environmental issues is elementary: ‘The fundamental position underlying sustainable development appears to be that the current model of unbridled production and consumption may be sustained as long as we do not destroy our environment in the process.’ Ironically, sustainability has in this way become a term to serve the status quo rather than an idea strong enough to effect real change in our bankrupt economic and political systems. The premise of the book is, correctly, that a structural revision of the industrial capitalist model is long overdue, and that it is therefore worth pondering what a sustainable architecture could look like. It is worth remembering that
like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, although his comparison of citizenship in Augustan Rome and contemporary Pyongyang is more interesting. The drivel of Kim Jong-il’s interminable treatise ‘On Architecture’ makes Posthafen read like a thriller in comparison. Mercifully, here we get an edited version — the original was five times longer. The Dear Leader was no Palladio. His banal generalisations, repetitions and inconsistencies are occasionally lightened by references to door handles or exhortations about making grand monuments to the leader (ie, him).
No mention is made of Pyongyang’s loony attempt to co-host the 1988 Olympics with Seoul, despite 30,000 crack soldiers from the Korean People’s Army being assigned to whip up a blizzard of buildings in Kwangbok. Desperate Olympic hopes are why vast athletic and housing facilities and the May Day Stadium, the world’s largest, were started. It’s a rare oversight in Meuser’s own essay surveying the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ that is Pyongyang. Overall, he has produced a fascinating insight, with great photography, into this freak city and the urbanism of megalomaniacs, both stranded by history.
the term ‘aesthetics’ once held a more moral dimension than how it is most commonly used now, but it is precisely in this more idealistic sense that the book develops its argument. In other words, it is assumed that sustainable architecture could take many shapes and forms, and by extension an important function is that the buildings communicate their sustainability to us.
The different authors see prospects for transformation in different arenas: for Sauerbruch and Hutton the potential lies in encouraging a change in lifestyles, whereas Frampton points towards impotence and ‘reactionary obtuseness’ in politics combined with a profession that has increasingly isolated itself. He argues that the tendency of design as an individualistic and fashionable will to form needs to be confronted headon in academia first. And there are those who address sustainability as a design challenge, such as Ralph R Knowles, who has been pursuing his ‘solar aesthetic’ for 50 years. Despite Knowles’ good judgment the long-awaited tipping point towards sustainably has yet to occur. An oversight in the book may be that the platform on which a new sustainable architecture and aesthetic will flourish has to be provided from bottom up, rather than top down. Let us hope that the recent expressions of people power are the first signs of a global awakening.