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.

Eastern Campus, TDH Bach Khoa Ha Noi

As promised, a tour of the Eastern campus of Truong Dai Hoc Bach Khoa Ha Noi, or the Hanoi Polytechnic University, or the Hanoi University of Technology. The eastern campus was originally separated from the western campus by the Set River, which as I noted last time was filled in about two years ago. The eastern campus consists primarily of student dormitories. It's also the location of the university's sport stadium and olympic-sized swimming pool. There are also two buildings of the French colonial authority's Cite Universitaire in the eastern campus. Below is one of them:

In official colonial literature of the 1930's and 40's there is a near obsession with the Cite Universitaire. Describing the "blossoming" of the city in the 1940's, the then mayor-resident of Hanoi wrote, "the first important act in the realisation of our grand plan has been the erection of a cite universitaire . . . In little time, Hanoi will beproud to possess a cite universitaire comparable in all aspects to the great cities of Europe." Ultimately however his vision would be completed by Soviet specialists some twenty years later.

A newly renovated colonial-era building

Standard student housing ~1965


Neighborhood map

Writ small in the eastern campus is a whole history of the city in the last century: from colonial era buildings, to massive Soviet construction, to tiger-cage style private homes, to the in-fill of new homes in the contemporary period. The value placed on the institution of the university has allowed these layers to remain intact, though the significance of each has changed with each historical accretion.

New housing abuts Soviet-era dormitories.
Elements of Art Deco, International Modernism, and Socialist Constructivism mix in the student housing which was however constructed in the Soviet period ~1965.

What's fascinating about the historical shifts embodied in changing building styles is sometimes not the difference evident, but the continuity. The last wave of French building in the 1930's brought with it Art Deco and International Modernism. These new modernist aesthetics already contained within them elements of internationalism that dovetailed with Socialist post-nationalism. Colonialism created a historical condition for vast modern experiments; in retrospect, these experiments don't appear as different as they once may have.

Western modernisms used the colonies as experimental spaces. Many have noted that French urbanisme could not be practiced in France and required "experimental fields" in which to work: the co-emergence of urbanisme as a science and colonialism as a social, historical, and economic condition is not coincidental.

What then to make of built legacy of successive colonizers? In the revolutionary period there, there was certainly talk of the necessity of destroying the legacy of both the feudalists and colonists. The revolutionary project required the demolition of the past in order to create a new future. What we see in Bach Khoa in this period is a search for purely socialist architecture (essentially, architecture of the future, "naked technology"). There is a movement from colony to post-national society without any of the intermediary historical stages. This was a revolution in building along with all other aspects of society. Again however, there's a kind of restrospective continuity.

Decorative grillwork

Consider then the complicated place these new modernist movements have in Vietnam. I'm primarily interested in the ways of colonialism, socialism, and nationalism (however incompatible as mythologies) have in fact been hybridized in historical and architectural fields. There are lots of strange, seemingly out-of-place decorative elements in TDH Bach Khoa like the grillwork above. There are also the absolutely necessary adaptation which have to be made in a tropical climate. Orthodox modernist forms are given verandas and bris-soleils to allow to make more hospitable learning environments. All of these variations are moving towards what I see as a greater hybridity.

View from the veranda

In terms of "hybrid architecture" TDH Bach Khoa is really not the greatest example. There is a kind of relentless futurism in its design which precludes too much "historical" reference. There is also an absence of any "indigenous" reference, suggesting that in Soviet thinking, just as in the French thought which preceded it, modernism and indigeneity were opposed. Of course, the extent to which Constructivist architecture is really "Russian" depends on one's reading of history (particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union), on whether or not "post-nationalism" and "pure technology" are possible, or if they are small aberrants in otherwise national narratives. Or perhaps post-nationalism and pure technology are the realities and nationalism is the comforting story we tell ourselves in an increasingly globalized world. What is at issue here is what the legacy of modernism is and ought to be. What TDHBK really demonstrates may be the story of modernity in Vietnam itself: a system of relations which undergo constant upheaval in the wholesale transformation of culture, economy, and society. TDHBK seems to suggest that this dialectic of modern centripetal and centrifugal forces may be subject to dynamics deeper than national affiliation.

New construction underway as the University expands

Whatever its legacy is however, TDH Bach Khoa set the building pattern on which virtually all of Vietnam's later universities are based. In addition, the university demonstrated the new technology of pre-fabricating concrete blocks. This technology would be employed all over Vietnam in the Soviet period. The innovations with concrete as well as the experimentation in passive design (as a means of efficient climate control) has led some to consider the tropical constructivism of the university to be the great architectural legacy of Vietnam. In future posts, I'll demonstrate some of the mutations these forms take in other, later universities.

In the past few years, some building have been demolished to make room for new construction.

The Stadium, with weird Olympic motif.





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Hue, Da Nang, Hoi An

Timeline! (kind of)

Not so nice picture, Museum of Cham Sculpture, Da Nang (~1915). This is an early example of French hybrid architecture a la Hebrard's "Style Indochinoise." There's a whole debate about the status of this architecture in terms of "genuine" hybridity or visual tokenism (symbolic gesture as opposed to any political power). More on that some other time.

School, Hoi An. I'm a little uncertain but I think this is a building dating from the early 20th century which was then retrofitted with a cement bris soleil in the Soviet period. I suspect that this was originally the front of the building--check out the fussy decorative pillars. Hoi An was a central trading town for Europeans, Indians, and Japanese from the 16th-19th centuries and consequently has a unique architectural history. Now it's a UNESCO world heritage site. Modernist house, Hoi An

Cathedral, Hoi An

This is a club for retired police officers in Hue.

Note the traditional Buddhist lotus and swastika motif in the grillwork. I'm interested in the ways these decorative and traditional elements are fused with a modernist style in this period. I suspect this building dates from the 1980's. There are similar decorative elements here, but judging from the size and color, I would guess this is from the 1980's or 90's. There's similar decoration on the Soviet Friendship Palace in Hanoi.

Hue Outskirts,1990's (?)

Public Housing, Da Nang