The former BATA Shoe Factory at 419 or 430 Lê Hồng Phong Street in District Ten is being demolished as I post this.
This is a sad day for me personally because this building was my favorite heritage modernist building, and Alexandre Garel’s beautiful photo of this building illustrated the cover of my book about Vietnamese modernist architecture. This is a sad day for Vietnam too, since it has again lost an important piece of its identity and heritage.
It was an industrial building, but nevertheless care and talent were expended by Vietnamese architects in designing a building that represented Vietnamese modernist architecture and identity at the mid-century. But being an industrial building, we usually expect that they have a limited life as industrial needs change. Thus they are subject to demolition.
However, in this age of global warming where carbon byproducts create conditions for that warming, it is important to limit further carbon emissions. One of the best ways to do this is to save the results of past carbon use so new carbon emissions can be limited. Buildings like the BATA factory represent ‘embodied carbon’ that can be reused in order to save the emissions necessary to build a new building. The BATA factory could have been easily adapted for use as a school or many other uses.
The BATA factory building is now lost as an important marker of Vietnamese identity and heritage, and could have been saved through its adaptive reuse.
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