Truong Dai Hoc Bach Khoa

Briefly, some history concerning Truong Dai Hoc Bach Khoa Ha Noi, or Hanoi Polytechnic University. In the period after the defeat of the French by Vietnamese national forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, in a period when Vietnam was divided into Northern and Southern Republics, North Vietnam was drawn into the economic and political sphere of the Soviet Union. In the period from 1954 through the doi moi period (~1986) the Soviet Union played a critical role in the design and finance of large scale building projects in Hanoi. One of the first of these large scale projects was the Polytechnic University. The specialists the new school would train would be those who would literally be building the new nation.
Currently it has 35,000 undergraduates and 2,000 graduate students.

The campus is oriented along something like an enormous central courtyard.
It's bounded on the west by Giai Phong street and to south by a residential area. To the north is Dai Co Viet street, across which is Lenin Park, something like the Central Park of Hanoi. To the east (of the campus proper) is a road which is about a year old. It was once a river. Note then that this map has yet to be updated, the blue curving line which runs North-South and which is labeled Song Set (Set River) is no longer.








From William Logan’s Hanoi: Biography of a City:

The Polytechnical Institute was to have had five faculties, mainly focusing on the physical sciences, engineering, mining and metallurgy. The complex was designed by a team of Soviet architects from Gyprovuz, headed by E.S. Budnik and P. Kuznetsov, and erected by Vietnamese construction organizations with technical assistance and project management by Soviet specialists.







Construction began in 1960 and ended in 1965. Importantly this was the first experiment in using pre-fabricated concrete construction (incidentally pre-fabrication took place on site)
Its current campus was constructed between 1960-1965 and was both funded and designed by the USSR.