Monumental Hanoi: 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.