Consider this picture of the Medical University is contrast to this picture of a public housing work nearby. They are nearly identical in form, but where some force does not act to preserve the original state of the building, a layer of accretions and additions forms on the same matrix. These accretions characterize the “tiger cages” of Hanoi, where privitization has caused each individual household to expand as much as possible: porches, or something like them are made by knocking down walls and building outwards. The tiger cages are a sign of the way social mass housing has failed to keep pace with explosive population growth. Why then is an identical structure within the confines of the university ossified in its original form?




First, from a more theoretical perspective I want to suggest that within the confines of the university an alternative set of values is at work. This may seem obvious, but what I want to suggest a la Mary Douglas is that we shouldn’t be too quick to assume that things simply “are” different in the university. It is a whole system of meaning which demands uniformity within the walls and allows profusion without.




Second, I don’t want to move away from historicism too much here. In fact, a dormitory room can never grow the way a personal household can because the student is not an owner. There was a time in fact before privitization when the distinction between a dormitory and a household was not as clear: this is the nature of the public housing built in the latter half of the 20th century in Hanoi.



Let’s imagine the story this way then: both of these buildings were built at approximately the same time both ostensibly to house masses of people. Under privitization, the family re-inscribed its central role: “the masses of people” fragmented along familial lines, suggesting that the family as a social unit was in fact incompatible with a purely communalistic worldview. This phenomenon manifests itself through the tiger cages, where the homogeneity of the housing is disrupted by the actions of individual families. Families grow, earn more money and need more space. Heterogeneity reigns.



While this is happening students continue to enter the dormitories. They are fairly homogenous in terms of age, social position, and educational background. They do not have ownership of their rooms but are rather vassals of the university. I mean to suggest that this homogeneity is a result of an underlying condition of homogeneity among the students, the role of the university as a socializing (and therefore homogenizing) agent, and the unquestioned role of the university as sole proprietor. This manifests itself in the homogeneity of the built form.

It might be helpful then to consider to exceptions which prove the rule. First, consider examples of modern communal housing where families opt-in to homogenous living. Modern religious communes demonstrate this well, and note that their housing is also homogenized. There, the “prior unit” of the family is willfully subsumed by the society. Also consider instances in the US and Europe where a notion of “student rights” emerges. There are colleges, Reed comes to mind, where students legally own some of the buildings on campus. They are thoroughly marked as having been appropriated.

From a practical point of view this suggests that inasmuch as the family is understood as that prior unit of society mass, homogenized housing does not reflect the reality of the lives housed. It’s tempting to talk about exogamy and endogamy and utopianism and socialism and totems, but all in time.