Christiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić, Model City Pyongyang, reviewed by Marc Kosciejew

Abstract

In Model City Pyongyang, the architects Cristiano Bianchi and Kristina Drapić shed light on this shrouded city by showing sumptuous photographs of its bizarre, yet beautiful, urban landscape. Specifically, Bianchi and Drapić provide a vibrant visual journey through the so-called hermit kingdom’s cryptic capital featuring 200 fanciful illustrations of buildings, structures and streetscapes rarely seen by foreigners. Adopting a photographic rather than textual approach to analysing the city, they explain that they ‘chose to communicate what we saw and the impressions we later digested through our photographs’ (pp. 13–15). By offering this extraordinary visual access to Pyongyang’s severely restricted world, they immerse readers in a seemingly different dimension, one full of elaborate symbolism. Indeed, this unparalleled photographic perspective reveals the extreme and singular ideological design of a city unseen elsewhere.