| Title |
Construction Process and Formal Strategies of the Pyongyang Students and Children’s Palace |
| DOI |
https://doi.org/10.5659/JAIK.2025.41.12.209 |
| Keywords |
North Korea; Pyongyang; Children; Palace; Educational Building; De-monumentalization |
| Abstract |
This study explores how the Pyongyang Students and Children’s Palace simultaneously represented state power and civic openness while
softening its monumental presence. Completed in 1963 in the heart of Pyongyang, the palace projected the authority of the Kim Il-sung
regime while providing diverse spaces for extracurricular education for the city’s children and youth. To do so, it orchestrated a set of
deliberately tensioned strategies: coupling symmetry with asymmetry; juxtaposing a vertical tower with expansive horizontal wings; hybridizing
Soviet neoclassicism with functional aesthetics; and dynamically integrating large-scale yet programmatically segmented massing into a
cohesive whole. This compositional logic drew on stylistic, technical, and discursive developments accumulated in North Korean and Soviet
architecture from the late-1950s to the early 1960s and subsequently set precedents for later students’ palaces across the country. Notably, the
building is among the few North Korean projects for which sources explicitly articulate its design rationale. Drawing on these sources, this
paper clarifies how the dual character of North Korean architecture?publicly promoted as architecture “for the people,” yet undergirded by
the symbolism of state power?was negotiated within a single architectural work. |