International Aid Monument, Saigon
The International Aid Monument was erected in 1965 in downtown Saigon, RVN, in accordance with a modernist design by Vietnamese architect Nguyễn Kỳ. It stands in an octagon-shaped pool known as Turtle Lake (Hồ Con Rùa), in honor of the statue of a turtle that existed at the monument until the turtle was destroyed in 1978. The pool and monument are surrounded by a traffic roundabout. This photo was taken by me in 1972. As a freshly-graduated young American architect, I was shocked to see this modernist sculpture and how it represented the extent to which the Vietnamese culture had embraced modernism, much more than anywhere else in the world.
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