Architecture in Anticipation: Building Socialist Friendship between Hungary and North Korea in the 1950s

Abstract

Beginning in the early 1950s, North Korea and Hungary forged a friendship in anticipation of building a new socialist world. In 1954, a team of Hungarian architects led by Emil Zöldy (1913–82) travelled to Pyongyang to design a broad spectrum of buildings and spaces in collaboration with North Korean architects and workers. Separate groups of Hungarian experts were also commissioned to design factories and plants in provincial North Korean cities such as Kusŏng. This essay examines how these large-scale construction projects operated on the ground, including some of the fissures and give-and-take of the friendship that was built between the Korean and Hungarian comrades. Their designs and construction projects, we argue, concretized and cemented the ephemeral and contingent experiences of socialist friendship between Korea and Hungary, even if its memory has been subjected to erasure in both the North Korean and Hungarian contexts.