Monumental Hanoi-NOW AVAILABLE

(Front cover) A traditional geomancic map of the energy fields created by a range of mountains and a detail of a concrete screen from the Hanoi University of Medicine.


I'm printing Monumental Hanoi, a compilation of writing and images about Hanoi's architecture. For those new to the blog, I've been looking at how the idea of nation has been invented, stolen, destroyed, and celebrated by the state builders of Hanoi. The book is 50 pages, hard-cover, and limited to a run of 100 signed and numbered copies. If you're interested, contact me at david.micah.le@gmail.com.

Monumental Hanoi is available at:

Urban Center Books
457 Madison Ave.
New York, NY
Tel. 212.935.3595
M-F: 10 am - 6:30 pm
Saturday: 12 - 5:30 pm

Spoonbill and Sugartown
218 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn, NY
Tel. 718.387.7322
Hours 10 am—10pm Daily

P.S. Bookshop
145A Front St
Brooklyn, NY
(718) 222-3340

The Bookworm
4b Yên Thế,
Hà Nội, Vietnam
Tel: (04) 747 87 78
Hours 10am - 7pm, closed Mondays

RUC and ITC

The entire teaching block of Leroy and Mondet's university rests on pilotis, concrete stilts which were one of the key design elements in Le Corbusier's design program.


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I thought I would be remiss in my duties if I didn't include some images of the universities to the east and west of Vann Molyvann's IFL. Built around the same period are, to the west, the Royal University of Cambodia, now the Royal University of Phnom Penh and, to the east, the Institut de Technologie du Cambodge, or ITC. The Royal University was designed by a French firm, Leroy and Mondet, which worked on a number of projects in Cambodia. The ITC was designed by Soviet specialists and is something like a Cambodian version of Hanoi's Polytechnic University, or Truoug Dai Hoc Bach Khoa. I foolishly missed my opportunity to photograph the ITC, and so am including both the photograph and description produced by the National Museum of Cambodia. Including Vann Molyvann's IFL, the three schools offer a comprehensive example of various mid-century modernist approaches to building educational spaces.

The pilotis on which the education block rests are truncated obliquely, their twisting facets play with light. The exposed ground level allows for better circulation of air, helping to cool the building above.



As with many universities in Vietnam, stairwells and corridors are exposed, aiding in the circulation of air. They are also prime example of the modernist interest in expressing the formal beauty of pure function. The whole appraoch of accessing class rooms through verandas and exterior stairs uses the building's circulation space as a barrier against sun and rain.

Not the best picture. I felt a little invasive photographing classrooms. You see here how airy the classrooms are however.

Leror and Mondet's design consists of two primary blocks: the education block and this meeting hall, whose curved shape it broken up by its geometric bris soleil. This is a view from the education block.


The meeting hall was recently renovated, suggesting a renewed interest in the maintenance of these buildings.


And from the National Museum of Cambodia:



"Designed by Russian architects and built with Soviet funds, this gift to Cambodia was an important addition to the growing number of tertiary educational facilities that were planned along the aptly named former boulevard USSR on the western outskirts of the city at Tuol Kok. Probably better known by its abbreviation ITC, this complex of buildings is superbly designed to accommodate students in airy classrooms and corridors through louvered screens that extend over the entire façade of the main building. Renovated with French funds, the university functions to teach the subjects for which it was originally designed."

New Khmer Architecture

Capitol Cinema, 1964, Vann Molyvann

I'm just back from a research trip to Phnom Penh, Cambodia which, following independence from France in 1953, became the capital of the newly independent nation as well as Cambodian modernism's proving ground. Cambodians, like the Vietnamese, needed to negotiate both a colonial past and the challenges of post-colonial independence: architecturally, these challenges were addressed by "New Khmer Architecture" and its most famous architect, Vann Molyvann.

Vann Molyvann's Chaktomuk Conference Hall

Born in 1926, Vann Molyvann was the citizen of a colonized Cambodia. However problematic the colonial regime may have been (and it certainly was), his colonial status allowed Vann Molyvann entrance into both the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris (he was originally admitted to law school, but found himself ill-suited and applied to art school instead). In Paris he studied under Le Corbusier. Vann Molyvann's work is often read in terms of Le Corbusier's dogmatic program of high modernist architecture and urbanism.



After returning to Cambodia in 1955, Molyvann was "Cambodia's first qualified post-independence architect" (this comes from a source I have reservations about, but it's certainly not a great stretch of the imagination: there were only a handful of scholarships for Cambodians to pursue higher education in the metropole. This is something to keep in mind about the reality of colonialism's "educating and civilizing" function, particularly as a context for Molyvann's extraordinary education.) Molyvann was then hired by the Ministry of Public Works and, indirectly, King Sihanouk. The period of Sihanouk's rule is frequently figured as a golden age in Cambodian history: a heady period of reformation, urbanization, and a pervasive spirit of progressivism. There was a tremendous need for an architecture to express this new reality, to embody both modern progress and indigeneity which, in the absence of the colonizer, enjoyed a newly privileged position.

A stylized Naga, or serpect demon

A Naga from Angkor

What was required was a native son conversant in both the vernacular and the language of high Modernism. This was a language embedded in a 20th Century mythology of rationalism, progressivism, post-nationalism and urban utopianism. Vann Molyvann, that native son trained in the new urbanism, was the perfect architect for his age. In the relatively short period of time between his return from Paris and his flight from Cambodia after Sihanouk was ousted in the 1970 military coup, Vann Molyvann saw the construction of numerous large-scale projects: from his Independence Monument and Olympic Stadium, to his Institute of Foreign Languages and Front Du Bassac housing project. He has left a vast body of work in Cambodia and in Phnom Penh in particular.



Before moving on, I'd like to make one observation: when Vann Molyvann returned to Cambodia, the city of Phnom Penh was going through a period of radical urbanization (in line with a similar "modernization projects" in other third world countries). The carte-blanche which this kind of modernization requires (and the creative destruction it entails) allowed him the rare opportunity to see countless projects realized. We have seen this centralization of power, this commitment to unchecked modernization embodied in Robert Moses, Baron Haussman, Peter the Great among other modernizers. The carte-blanche they enjoyed was intimately related, perhaps even identical, to the carte-blanche all colonizers gave themselves in the colony.

I would argue that if you want to see unchecked modernization through urbanization, the real place to look is the colonies, where the colony qua "champs d'experience" (or experimental field) allowed modernism its greatest urban test grounds. From this I draw a conclusion: there is a real historical relationship between the colony as experimental grounds and the metropole as the ultimate destination for those experiments. This means that the colony allowed the metropole to learn how to colonize/modernize itself. This disturbs the definition of both "colony" and "metropole" as well as their respective ethical values and their relationships to the very idea of "modernity." It also suggests that colonialism served a fundamental part in creating modernity as a cultural, economic, and aesthetic reality.

Part of the National Sports Complex or Olympic Stadium, 1964

Exterion Stairs


If we understand the "colony" as a suite of power relations which may remain intact in the "post-colony" then perhaps we should watch with greater suspicion whenever we see that volatile mixture of the will-to-monumentalize and centralization of power. This is to say that Vann Molyvann's lineage must include the colonial architects (the colonizer/modernizers) who preceded him.

That said, Vann Molyvann's work is beautiful and responded to real needs with genuine artistry. Like all masterpieces, the work contains within it a tension which both affirms itself and engages its viewer in a dialogue about the problems it must face and create.

I'd like to look at a university Vann Molyvann designed as well as a few statements he's made to better understand the interrelationships of these ideas.


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The circular structure in the Library, note the courtyard

The Institute of Foreign Languages was designed by Vann Molyvann in the late 1960's. The institute consists of three main sections: the round and faceted library, a large central building containing classrooms, and another set of classrooms built on concrete pilotis (or stilts). As you can see from the satellite photo above, the central building block is accessed via a ramp, which rises from street level to the raised concourse, which gives access to both the main education block, and, to the west, the second education block. Pools (dry in the aerial photo) lie on both sides of the ramp as well as around the library, which is accessed by a flight of stairs which rises above the moat.

The library in its moat

The institute is classically modernist in many ways: from its building materials (concrete, steel, glass), to its geometric form and rationalistic organization of space. The main ramp and the raised concourse suggest a distinctively modernist interest in the orderly circulation of bodies through space. The ramp however does not evoke only the highway (to which it is connected) although this connection is doubtlessly intentional: Vann Molyvann also creates life underneath the ramp, framing views of the library and creating a shaded and cool walkway which conveys pedestrians to the education block shielded from both tropical sun and rain.

The eastern wall of the main building block marks a limit of the space, note how a "brick wall" here is used to mark the boundary.

The floating brick wall appears again on the western wall of the second block, closing and bracketing the space.

Vann Molyvann is not however transplanting an alien style here, but developing a hybrid better suited to local conditions and able to reflect its national character. Throughout the site there is a notable effort to control the level of light, maximize the circulation of air, and offer shelter from tropical storms. As I've noted before, one of the key features of traditional Vietnamese architecture is the integration of environmental elements into the design: trees and bodies of water are used in ingenious ways to lower the temperature of the site and allow for drainage. This kind of "passive" design controls climate without consuming any energy. We see the same design principles at work in the institute.

The courtyard-facing side of the second block. An enormous banyan tree grows in the center of the courtyard.

A key feature of Vann Molyvann's design is the use of vernacular style. The institute refers again and again to the Angkorian kingdom, and its finest monument: Angkor Wat. Angkor Wat is also entered through a ramp, and to reinforce the connection, Vann Molyvann even includes two sets of stylized Nagas, the serpent demons whose heads guard the Angkorian temple entrances and whose bodies mark and protect their perimeters. The symmetrical placement of the pools on opposite sides of the ramp also appears at Angkor.

Library interior

I'd like to think now about monumentality as an organizing principle: the institute clearly possesses a monumental character--from its function as an educational and cultural center, to its large scale and dialogical connection to Angkor Wat (the monument par excellence). It is a space imbued with meaning. The institute even meets the Eliadean criterion of the center in that it is meant to connect the viewer to his mythical origins and provide both temporal and spatial orientation.

Angkor Wat

I'm a little wary of this however as one of the marks of the French Empire was its monumental fixation. Susan Bayly has written an excellent essay on the subject of this monumental preoccupation called "French Anthropology and the Durkheimians in Colonial Indochina." She notes that French colonists identified themselves with the Champa, a kingdom centered near present day central Vietnam which famously built towers similar to those at Angkor (the Champa incidentally were frequently at odds with the Angkorian kingdom and sacked Angkor Wat in the 12th century). In a Durkheimian scheme, monumentality is a mark of advanced sociality and offers therefore an "objective" metric for a society's level of "development." (Bayly also notes that the French identified not only with the Champa's monumentality but their present state of decay.) In preserving this monumental fixation in the period of national independence, I worry that Vann Molyvann inadvertently reinforced this monumental fixation. The insistence on Angkor Wat as a rebuttal to French monumentality is confined safely within the bounds of a traditional monumental discourse.

In other ways however, the institute also shows a notably anti-monumental character. The form of the library is said to be borrowed from the shape of a traditional hat. The traditional stilt house is reflected in the use of pilotis throughout the site. And overall, the atmosphere I think the institute creates is not one of monumental domination but rather balanced co-existence. By monumentalizing traditional and traditionally impermanent forms (the hat, the stilt house) and in working modestly (for a modernist project), Vann Molyvann engages the monumental question and the imperial legacy in a non-dialectical way.

Does the meaning of a high modernist form change when it is circumscribed by the mythical Nagas? When a trajectory is drawn from the Angkorian kingdom to the new capital by way of Paris, where and when are the capital's origins? Is it possible to build monuments which have the potential to question the assertions they make?

Phnom Penh, Cambodia

Meeting center, Bach Mai, Hanoi

As the revolutionary years past and Vietnam moved into the last quarter of the 20th century, Vietnamese architecture moved away from the rectilinear forms of high modernism (think Soviet era pre-fabrication) to more varied post-modern and post-colonial forms. I don't mean to suggest that these "post-isms" correspond to radical social reorganizations or even totally distinct aesthetic movements. As I've noted in the past, we should be conscious of the ways that a fixation on changing surfaces can ignore structural stability, and ethical stagnation within a society.


University of Cultural Studies, Hanoi. Note how the cement pillars evoke a stilt house. The "traditional" roof shape over the stairs is reflected as a motif in the shape of the windows over the central section.

If we think of TDH Bach Khoa as a kind of modernist "end of architecture" approaching the unity of form and function, then the question of what-comes-next is interesting. I think it's clear that TDH Bach Khoa is not in fact anything like an "end of architecture" and that it has its particularities, local accommodations, even ornamentation, but in terms of understanding what follows its helpful of thinking of TDH Bach Khoa as a figure of high modernism: an experiment in creating rational architecture for a new Man, that mythic figure who has arrived at post-nationalism, stripped of the totems and illusions of his past mythologies and prepared to enter the last chapter of History.

Water elements (dry here in winter) and plantings are places among the stilts, creating a pastoral effect below the modern building.

Recreations of the Dong Son bronzes are affixed to a gate at the Bach Mai meeting house.

What happened however, as the revolution receded, was the emergence of a new architecture which re-populated the spaces emptied by high modernism. This new architecture sought to create a new architectural language which incorporated phantasmatic images and signs of an authentic (pre-colonial) past. The stilt house, the dinh (meeting house), and the chua (temple)
were appropriated as precisely these figures of tradition and authenticity. Though these had, in the revolutionary period, been understood as "feudal" in purely Marxist terms, they were now re-appraised. The Dong Son bronzes (dating from ~600 BC - ~300 AD) also became important symbols of this "authentic" past. Ironically, may of the bronzes of were discovered by colonial archaeologists in the 20th century.

People's Committee building Ha Noi, note the "stilts" as well the bamboo inspired bris-soleil (a la Ngo Viet Thu)

In actuality it's misleading to think of these forms as being important only after the aesthetic de-population of 1960's high modernism. The bronzes were an important symbol in nationalist discourses before independence from France. Ho Chi Minh famously associated his image with the stilt house behind the colonial governor's mansion rather than with the mansion itself and the message was clear: Western forms were colonial, decadent, and alien while "traditional" forms were authentic, anti-bourgeois, and national. In fact, the ways that "the indigenous" and "the modern" have been variously oppposed and hybridized throughout the 20th century are varied and complex.

A strange mix of styles.

The references at work here to stilt houses, bamboo, and the dong son bronzes represent yet another chapter in this interrelationship. Much of this Soviet and post-Soviet architecture is not particularly valued or loved, but I think it really merits some appreciation considering its strange commitment to these two fraught principles

Ngo Viet Thu

Medical University, HCM City

Ngo Viet Thu was the architect of the Presidential Palace as well as the Pedagogical University in Hue, about which I posted in July. He was born in 1926 near Hue where, in addition to the Pedagogical University, he designed a church which you can see below. For a timeline of his life and works check out: http://www.geocities.com/namsonngoviet/NgoVietThu.html

Ngo Viet Thu was born and raised in Vietnam and studied at Truong Cao Dang in Da Lat and then the Academie des Beaux Arts in Paris. In 1955 he won the prestigious Rome Competition (the Academie's highest architectural prize) and in 1962 became the first Asian architect to be made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects. His close association with the Southern regime led to a year-long term in a "re-education" camp. In his later years, the political climate seemed to have changed enough that he was able to return to work. In his final years he regained his good public standing and was involved in a number of important and highly visible design projects.

Central Market, Da Lat, a collaborative project

Church, Hue

Pedagogical University, Hue

Ngo Viet Thu (1926-2000)

Right now, I'm trying to figure out what his involvement was with the agrovilles program, which was a massive forced relocation project in South Vietnam in the 1960's (which later evolved into the strategic hamlet program). The agrovilles were ostensibly modernization projects: they would concentrate populations to aid economic development and increase access to public services. These concentrated populations would be situated along major highways, increasing their connection to political and economic centers. In actuality they resembled massive prisons, with gates and guards present to "protect them" from the influence of the Viet Cong. They were also built with corvee labor, then once the families were re-located and forced to re-construct their homes, they were forced to pay the government for their new land (which incidentally was expropriated by the government).

Reunification Palace, HCM City/ Presidential Palace, Saigon

I've been wrestling with finding the best ways to write about the Reunification Palace for a few days now and I haven't come to any great answers. I think it's going to be the subject of a paper or chapter, for the time being then, I'll offer some basic information and limit my analysis to "the French connection."

Norodom Palace

The Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City was, before 1975, the Presidential Palace in Saigon. Construction of the palace began in 1962, almost exactly 100 years after construction began on Norodom Palace, the office and residence of the French Governors General of Indochina which previously occupied the site. The irreparable damage done to Norodom Palace by American bombers in 1962 led to its demolition and the erection of the new palace. (The palace was inaugurated in 1967, meaning that it's design and completion occurred at almost exactly the same time as Truong Dai Hoc Bach Khoa in Hanoi.)

Reunification Palace

I think these two aerial views can help to illustrate some important aspects of the legacy of French colonialism. First, note the similarity in basic form, the same insistence on the use of monumental axes as means of expressing state power. A New York Times article suggested that the design was based on a traditional Vietnamese character (Vietnamese was once written with the Nom script, which uses Sinitic characters). I tend to think the architect, Ngo Viet Thu, used the design of the original structure as a template. Consider too that both Ngo Viet Thu and Hermite, the architect of the original palace, were both products of the same classical Beaux-Arts education. This raises an essential question of the post colony: to what extent are the regimes of the post-colony doomed to replicate the structure, institutions, and policies of the colonial authorities which precede them? If the colony is in fact a suite of power relations does the national identity of the individuals who occupy particular positions really alter anything?


Central Atrium

It would be possible to see the Reunification Palace as evidence of continuity with the (colonial) past. The fact of Ngo Viet Thu's Beaux-Arts education and his use of the largely (Western) International Style suggest precisely this continuity. If we look a little more closely though, it's possible to both suggest that something new is being made here; borne of both a colonial past and a sense of continuity with a pre-colonial past, an authentic Vietnamese-ness.

(This is my account of how a new mythology in the post colonial period is made; I talk about the pre-colonial past, authentic Vietnameseness, memory, etc. as a local symbol set here and am avoiding analysis so far. Here too theory and history seem very different: is International Modernism really North Atlantic early 20th Century style? Is it the style of Late Capitalism in a few Western metropolises? Or all this and more . . .)

Many have written that it is precisely this obsessive searching for an authentic (and, the thinking goes, pre-colonial) past which characterizes the post-colony. Anti-colonialism may serve as an effective unifying political force during the last days of the colonial period, but in the post colonial period there is turn to autocthony, memory, and a blood-based identity in the post-colony to re-inscribe nationhood. This keep the reigns of power in the post-colonial authority's hands, extinguishes the revolutionary flames (to mix metaphors), and importantly attempts to create a meaningful home for the nation. The memory of this invented past also seems to require a new and reductive sense of both the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Visually, we could read the use of traditional crafts and motifs in the palace as precisely this kind of search for authenticity.

What we see everywhere in the Palace however is the endless and conscientious mixing or hybridization of both modernist and traditional elements. I would like to suggest that this offers a pervasive and inclusive visual style which disrupts modernism as a purely occidental trope, and the widely held idea of the post-colony as doomed to both mimicry or a fetishized past. What Ngo Viet Thu attempted to do, and I think did successfully is invent a Vietnamese Modernist style, a disruptive hybrid which expanded the possible meanings of each of its constituent parts.
The facade consists of a stylized row of concrete bamboo which functions as a bris-soleil


The use of traditional Vietnamese imperial design elements evoke a dual history of monumentalities: remember that monumental axes have longer roots in Vietnam than their use by the Colonial authority.

Traditional Vietnamese Art is generally considered to include woodblock print making, silk painting, and most famously, lacquerware. Here lacquer has been used to decorate chairs as well as to panel the walls of the room.

Lacquer panels

Stylized traditional motifs (here, a sun and dragons, an imperial symbol)

The use of traditional signs embedded in an international modernist matrix anticipates post-modernism: signs and particularities re-inscribe themselves here freely and in new constellations. This is not the kind of post-modernism which self-referentially empties the signs of their meanings but one which instead tries to weave a cohesive whole from the visual fragments of past, present, and future. If high modernist aesthetics can be said to move in the direction of a pure form, of movement away from the illusion, distraction, and particularity of previous aesthetics, post-modernism can be seen as an experimental field in which artists follow this "end of art" with a re-population of signs. Here, the requirement of a kind simultaneity of opposites ("the indigenous" and "the modern") has given rise to an early post-modernism: in fact, it is precisely this kind of coincidence of opposites which will be said to characterize post-modernism.

That said, this pre-cursor of post modernism may be said to be guilty of precisely the same crimes that contemporary post modernism is guilty of: a blind fascination with surfaces that has somehow forgotten the political and economic structures which surround it. The Presidential Palace was designed for a corrupt tyrant and it was absolutely meant to convey both his entrenched power and his continuity with a long line of autocrats, both indigenous and alien.

Though the North certainly had its own problems (don't get me started) it's easy to imagine the Presidential Palace as a kind of capitalist folly, an opulent and decadent monument to a past of gross economic inequality. Let's not fall too easily into bad pseudo-Marxist aesthetic criticism though: the Presidential Palace or Reunification Palace is a masterpiece of design, both modernist and Vietnamese.