Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang (Two Volume Box Set)

Two volume box set. Take a look at the photos. Both books are in exceptional condition. They look pretty much new. The covers look terrific, very clean. The books are square and very solidly bound from cover to cover. The page edges are perfectly clean. I'm really not seeing any conspicuous wear. The interiors of both books are in excellent condition. I scrolled through the pages without finding any soiling or creasing. There are no markings or attachments. And no one has written their name or anything else anywhere in either book. The box slipcase is in excellent condition as well, very clean and pretty much free of wear. It is very solid. 'What's behind North Korea's strange architecture? Pyongyang's unique streetscape opens a window on a secretive regime. Pyongyang is one of the least accessible big cities in the world, but for visitors who manage to spend time there, it's not unusual to come away impressed--sort of. North Korea may be an economic basket case, but its capital manages a certain Washington-like splendor: It's a city of sweeping boulevards lined with multistory office and housing complexes, wide squares, and grassy river banks studded with monuments. But visitors also tend to develop a few questions. Why is most of the populace walking, with just a sprinkle of automotive traffic, on those vast boulevards? Why does so little light shine from the windows of the giant apartment buildings? Why does the tallest building in the city, the 105-story, pyramid-shaped Ryugyong Hotel erected in 1987, remain an uncompleted shell? An impulse to come to terms with one of the world's strangest cities animates Architectural and Cultural Guide: Pyongyang. In two volumes, this appropriately strange new book pairs a reprint of the North Korean government's own guide to its capital with a collection of essays by outsiders about what, exactly we're seeing here. The editor, Berlin architect Philipp Meuser, describes the work as "a paradoxical attempt to lend normalcy to the abnormal." A Western architecture guide to an Eastern city that receives few Western visitors is a curious thing to start with. Beyond that, some might find it almost indecent to think of Pyongyang as an aesthetic achievement. After all, the most towering fact about North Korea isn't its buildings but the dire circumstances of its people--a country of 24 million now entering the third generation of rule by a dynasty of dictators whose early run of economic policy successes sputtered to an end a half-century ago. But buildings are valuable aids to understanding any society, and perhaps even more so when it comes to one of world's most isolated and secretive regimes. The city's centrally planned skyline, its huge empty avenues and libraries and stadiums, reflect a very particular fusion of Korean culture with socialist ideology. And the streetscape of Pyongyang tells much of the story of North Korea: the gulf between the strange ambitions of the buildings and the often invisible citizens for whom they are notionally built. Pyongyang was originally a provincial seat--known around the turn of the 20th century as the Jerusalem of the Far East, thanks to the success of resident American Protestant missionaries in converting people and establishing churches. Its fortunes changed sharply in 1945, when Josef Stalin sent troops into the northern half of Korea to accept the Japanese surrender of the territory; he installed Kim Il Sung as its ruler and made Pyongyang the capital of the newly partitioned country. The city was nearly flattened by US aerial bombardment in the Korean War, presenting Kim an opportunity after the Armistice to "reconstruct the city from the ground up" as Ahn Chang-mo of South Korea's Kyonggi University notes in his history chapter in Meuser's book. What resulted, he writes, was something unique: "a new city with an architecture that approximates the ideals of socialism more closely than any other socialist city." '.…