As the leaders of America take the USA into the decadence of mandating the use of Greco-Roman classical architecture, we are thankful to celebrate the Vietnamese culture in their embracing of modernism. Our forthcoming book "Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture" celebrates the achievements of the Vietnamese in developing a modernist vernacular architecture that represents their identity and beautifies their world.
The classicists in the U.S. and the U.K. insist that only classical architecture is beautiful and that modernism is a "hideous cultural atrocity." It seems that half of Americans believe this, which is not surprising considering the practical nature of American culture.
The marker for judging the acceptance of an architecture is what people live in. Westerners have never much accepted modernist architecture for their houses, The houses of Americans are modern, but not modernist, and are usually of historicist period-revival styles such as Spanish-colonial. Meanwhile, the southern Vietnamese actively embraced their version of modernist architecture in the mid-century and continue to do so today. There are few other cultures in the world that have done so to the degree the Vietnamese have. You can pick any southern Vietnamese neighborhood at random and walk down the streets and find that substantially over half of the houses are beautiful modernist.
How and why did the southern Vietnamese embrace modernism? Those are the questions answered in our forthcoming book. We look forward to announcing its publication soon.
