In our upcoming book on "Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture," we claim that southern Vietnam became a center of modernism in the world because the culture embraced modernism. The modernist architecture of Vietnam became the vernacular architecture of houses. If you pick any street or lane at random in the southern cities, you can walk down that street and find that over 70% of the houses will be overtly modernist, and the remainder will be a mix of utilitarian and neoclassical. This community is unusual in the world. Not many cultures have embraced modernism like this. Seventy years of modernist architecture in Vietnam has made it a center of modernism in the world.
This streetscape shows the typical modernist architecture along Hẻm 15, Đường Cầu Xéo in the Tân Phú District of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Only the first house on the left is not modernist.
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