24 photos that show North Korea's obsession with huge, weird buildings

The world's attitude toward North Korea tends to swing between playful mocking and genuine horror.

Like dictatorships before it - namely, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia - North Korea tends to embody that range of emotion through its architecture.

On the one hand, there's the country's fondness for pastel hues, which recall 1950s Americana. But on the other, there are the towering concrete buildings that shroud observers in their shadow.

In a country that keeps so much under wraps, the architecture ends up speaking volumes.