First, let’s look across the Yalu River to see how construction is done in Dandong right at the waterfront. You’ll see clean concrete, construction lifts and bamboo grids with green nets.
Let’s now go back to North Korea and see how construction is done here:
First, the material to build with has to be taken from riverbeds or quarries.
The stones are then sorted and classed by size.
In the next step, they’re broken to smaller fragments. A drum-like machine is depicted in the above photo on the left. The stones are put in there with giant bowling size iron balls to crush the material. The crushed stones are then used to heavily stretch cement to form rudimentary bricks.
Those bricks are used to build most of the structure…
…while real concrete and steel are used to build the necessary skeleton. Lack of proper tools and knowledge reveals a nasty finish.
Here’s an example of construction at the Ryugyong Hotel. You’ll see in the lower right corner the mounting brackets for the glass facade.
After the building is roughly finished, the rough spots are being covered with plaster, to paint it later on.
Click on the photo to enlarge. Some rudimentary construction outside Sinujiu. Instead of carts to transport material, they use two-man wooden stretcher like thing with one open end on one side to quickly poor stuff on the next pile.
Click on the photo to enlarge. Building a concrete road right outside Sinujiu.
