Ambitiously designed community buildings, faceless mass housing developments, and a monumental emptiness are the defining features of Pyongyang - a city of three million inhabitants rising from the rubble to which the Korean War reducedit in the 1950s. This architectural guide to the capital of the Democratic PeoplesRepublic of Korea has two parts comprising a total of 368 pages. While Volume 1 offers a selection of images and information on nearly one hundred buildings in Pyongyang provided by the Pyongyang Foreign Languages Publishing House and presented here without further commentary, Volume 2 sets this materialwithin its architectural and historical context.The Architectural and Cultural Guide Pyongyang offers unprecedented insights into the capital of what is probably the most isolated country in the world, ruled in the third generation by a first family stubbornly upholding its own brand of stone-age communism.

Philipp Meuser. Born in 1969, Philipp Meuser studied architecture in Berlin and Zurich with a focus on theory and history of architecture. He is a member of the German architects association BDA, co-manager (with Natascha Meuser) of Berlin-based Meuser Architekten GmbH, and manager of DOM publishers. Philipp Meuser has realized numerous planning and building projects in Russia and Asia and has authored a number of books on Soviet history of architecture as well as contemporary architecture in Russia and Central Asia. Ahn Changmo. Architectural historian Ahn Changmo is professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Kyonggi University, South Korea. He was a guest researcher at Columbia University (1998) and Tokyo University (2010). Born in 1962, he gained his doctorate (1997) at Seoul National University. Ahn Chang-mo has published widely on North and South Korean history of architecture. Christian Posthofen. Born in 1956, Christian Posthofen studied philosophy and history in Cologne, Germany. He is general editor at the publishing branch of Walther Koenig Books Ltd, with whom he has worked since 1980 at their offices in Cologne and Berlin, and has edited numerous publications on architecture. He has been teaching at the Nuremberg Academy of Fine Arts since 2004.