Architecture Vietnam

The Values of Heritage Conservation

My second article, this one on the values of heritage conservation, was published by the magazine TiaSáng this month, in Vietnamese language, and can be read at this link: https://tiasang.com.vn/tin-noi-bat/tieu-diem/bao-ton-di-san-bao-ve-can-tinh-viet-nam/ TiaSáng is a publication of the Vietnam Ministry of Science and Technology. The original English-language version can be read or downloaded from Google Drive at this link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uB3lcsF7I_kIYtSM4WVimI9SVxsdhipa/view?usp=sharing

Here is the lede paragraph for this article:

“The article entitled “Kiến Trúc Hiện Đại: Giá trị riêng của Việt Nam” [Modernist Architecture: Vietnam’s Own Values] published in volume number 17 of TiaSáng Magazine on 5 September 2022 presented the values of mid-century Vietnamese modernist architecture which expressed Vietnamese identity as traditional architecture did in the past. And this Vietnamese-developed architecture continues to express the value of Vietnamese aspirations and their strong place in the world today. Nevertheless, this architecture is in increasing danger of being demolished, with the accompanying loss of Vietnamese identity. What can Vietnam do to protect its heritage and identity?”

Abstract expression of Vietnamese architecture of the mid-century is exhibited in a small southern Vietnam hotel

Alex and I are pleased that our book "Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-Century Modernism" is getting closer to publication. We are blessed with the graphic design talent of Mads Monsen in laying out the book design for the international version. With his layout, we now know that there are too many pages to economically print, so we have made some tough decisions to delete a few of the projects. The Ngọc Mỹ Hotel is one of them.

This small four-story hotel (now an apartment building) at Two Trần Ngọc Diện Street in the Thảo Điền Ward of District Two is an abstract expression of function in its composition. While the bathrooms are the plain wall areas, the balconies cantilever out with large openings into the rooms.

The beams showing under the roof plane and each of the balconies express the structure. Planters on the terraces are lifted up from the balcony floors to become sculptural elements. You can see by the high-rise luxury housing in the background that architectural heritage like this is threatened with demolition. 

This beautiful architectural photography is copyrighted by Alexandre Garel 2019.

The definition of architecture, by Victor Hugo

Why Notre Dame matters, in one Victor Hugo passage

@constancegrady has an article out on Vox that puts the value of Notre Dame in perspective. She focuses on a passage by Victor Hugo in his book "The Hunchback of Notre Dame," published in 1831. The book became very popular and resulted in public pressure to restore the deteriorating Notre Dame cathedral.

The passage reads like a definition of the best of architecture and art:

Great edifices, like great mountains, are the work of centuries. Art often undergoes a transformation while they are pending, pendent opera interrupta; they proceed quietly in accordance with the transformed art. The new art takes the monument where it finds it, incrusts itself there, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its fancy, and finishes it if it can. The thing is accomplished without trouble, without effort, without reaction,— following a natural and tranquil law. It is a graft which shoots up, a sap which circulates, a vegetation which starts forth anew. Certainly there is matter here for many large volumes, and often the universal history of humanity in the successive engrafting of many arts at many levels, upon the same monument. The man, the artist, the individual, is effaced in these great masses, which lack the name of their author; human intelligence is there summed up and totalized. Time is the architect, the nation is the builder. […]

All these shades, all these differences, do not affect the surfaces of edifices only. It is art which has changed its skin. The very constitution of the Christian church is not attacked by it. There is always the same internal woodwork, the same logical arrangement of parts. […] The service of religion once assured and provided for, architecture does what she pleases. Statues, stained glass, rose windows, arabesques, denticulations, capitals, bas-reliefs,—she combines all these imaginings according to the arrangement which best suits her. Hence, the prodigious exterior variety of these edifices, at whose foundation dwells so much order and unity. The trunk of a tree is immovable; the foliage is capricious.

It took 200 years to build Notre Dame. Great examples of Vietnamese modernist architecture, like the Independence Palace, took only a few years, but the level of art and the value of the architecture is comparable to a degree.