An ordinary apartment house

Apartment house at 5 Cao Thắng Street in Ho Chi Minh City

What is the difference between global modernism and Vietnamese modernism? This building is an ordinary apartment house. There are many apartment buildings like this one at 5 Cao Thắng Street in District Three in Ho Chi Minh City. In western countries, an ordinary apartment house would most likely be minimalist and utilitarian. There would be the same windows of the same size, but there would be no added sunscreens or other added elements like there are here in Vietnam. It would just be a plain box building. As this building shows, Vietnamese modernist architecture adds many elements that give the building human scale, like the outer corridor wrapping around the front facade, or the structure of sun screening elements on the side facade. These added elements make Vietnamese modernist buildings much richer in appearance.