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.