culture

Jonwi Street is located in the Sopho area, the northern gateway to the capital city of Pyongyang.

At the time of ground-breaking, there were few noticeable buildings in the area. But now it boasts a large spectacular architectural group with high-rise and super-high-rise apartment houses of various styles and public buildings standing in a row along the broad avenue.

The magnificence of the street is highlighted with super-high-rise apartment houses arranged to form a group centring on an iconic 80-storey apartment building in consideration of relevant topographies and zones to enhance their architectural effect. The tiles of dignified colours covering the exteriors of the buildings and the classical beauty of its architectural style add to the quality of the buildings.

Every structure is unique in elevation to meet its mission and structural elements of the apartment houses are very distinctive. In particular, the seven- and ten-storey apartment houses of Blocks Nos. 21 and 22 are of new styles in elevation composition. All their elevations consist of protruding verandas and many parts of their exteriors are decorated with glass walls to give viewers light feeling and a sense of security and further improve the artistic quality and harmony of the buildings while easily solving the problem of lighting.

The apartment houses are topped with wing-shaped lightweight roofs to make their exteriors formatively modern and noble and add to their unique elevations.

The two-storey service networks on the low floors of the buildings are linked with connecting corridors to promote the convenience of people and the entire walls of the second floors distinctively consist of glass windows. And there is a service building with the ground floor covered with glass walls and the first floor shaded with vertical latticework on a low floor of an apartment house on the street.

The street is also featured by the use of conspicuous decorative windows for the unique elevation composition of high-rise apartment houses. As for different blocks of high-rise apartment houses, window frames as constituent units are designed to highlight decorative factors of architectural details so as to make the buildings suit their mission and character and their elevation composition elegant.

Another feature of elevation composition on the street is that overall symmetry is ensured in the decoration of windows with asymmetrical effects on some parts, thus overcoming simplicity and boredom.

Appropriate colours were used to finish the decorative frames of windows to ensure their harmony with the sky, the background of the buildings, and highlight the outlines of the buildings, making their appearance clear in sharp contrast to the surrounding structures.

Jonwi Street, whose construction started in February 2023, was inaugurated in May the following year.

Setting the housing construction, a revolution that brings about epochal changes and a project greatly favoured by the people, as the first major policy task, the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un set forth the task of building a new street in the Sopho area apart from the construction of 10 000 flats in Pyongyang in 2023 at the Sixth Plenary Meeting of the Eighth Central Committee of the Workers’ Party of Korea and entrusted the huge task to the Socialist Patriotic Youth League and the Paektusan Hero Youth Shock Brigade.

He personally attended the ground-breaking ceremony for the construction of the new street in the Sopho area, place absolute trust in the young builders with his stirring speech in which he encouraged them to bravely fight for the eternal prosperity of the socialist state and for the capital city of Pyongyang, named the street Jonwi, and saw to it that the project was given priority as a state affair and full weight thrown behind it.

The young people, who received his trust as their life and nutrient for performing feats, wonderfully built the new street for the people, a symbol of the development of socialism and the future of the country, in a year by performing miracles and encouraging innovations.