Ten years have already passed since the respected Comrade Kim Jong Un visited our university on the occasion of its 60th anniversary, says Kim Jong Chol, president of Pyongyang University of Architecture. “But our lecturers and students still cherish the memory of the day of honour.”

On November 26 2013, after exchanging warm greetings with the officials who came to greet him,

Kim Jong Un said he decided to visit the university as it occupies an important position in building a civilized socialist country, adding that he would actively support the university’s work as its honorary president, true to the intention of President Kim Il Sung and Chairman Kim Jong Il who had attached importance to its work in every period of the revolution and construction.

Looking round different places of the university that day, he said that students should firmly arm themselves with the Juche-oriented architectural idea of the Workers’ Party, study hard with an awareness that they should draw up the blueprint of a civilized socialist country in the future and with a driving ambition and dream of becoming world architects and thus make a positive contribution to the building of a civilized socialist nation.

He also indicated the tasks and ways for bringing about a turn in education as required by the developing reality in which a great heyday is being ushered in in construction and thus training many point men for the building of a civilized socialist country.

Looking back on the day with deep emotion, Kim Jong Chol said that after his visit to the university the students’ consciousness that they should draw up the blueprint of a civilized socialist nation fused with the educators’ sense of mission to train them into competent revolutionary talents with great abilities, thus producing tremendous strength.

In 2014 alone, the year after the university held up Kim Jong Un as its honorary president, the teaching staff and students completed more than 240 designs and mock-ups with extraordinary thinking and practical abilities and achieved lots of educational and scientific research successes equivalent to those achieved in three years.

The students of the university were just the creators of blueprints who designed the exteriors and interiors of edifices for the past ten years, including the Sci-Tech Complex, Ryomyong Street, the seat of the City of Samjiyon, Songhwa Street and the first-stage 10 000 flats in the Hwasong area.

“When they were assigned a designing task, every student thought they were not only students. Their awareness of being point men drawing up the blueprint of a civilized socialist nation enabled them to do more than they could,” said Ryang Pong Jin, dean of a faculty.

In those days of quest and speculation, the university completed more than 8 500 designs and mock-ups on the highest level.

In the past decade it introduced more than 140 subjects including intelligent architectural engineering, developed over 300 efficient and advantageous teaching methods and intensified research into 5D design education, thereby improving the quality of education in design.

It arranged hundreds of academic seminars, itinerant lectures and short courses with similar universities and expanded the distance education system for designers and other working people in local areas, thus creditably discharging its role as a hub of science, information, data service and online education in the field of architecture.

In the course of this, the number of holders of academic degrees and titles increased considerably among educators and many lecturers and researchers became the best scientists of the country, won the February 16 Science and Technology Prize and the title of Merited Scientist and were honoured to be meritorious persons of socialist patriotism.