Meeting center, Bach Mai, Hanoi

As the revolutionary years past and Vietnam moved into the last quarter of the 20th century, Vietnamese architecture moved away from the rectilinear forms of high modernism (think Soviet era pre-fabrication) to more varied post-modern and post-colonial forms. I don't mean to suggest that these "post-isms" correspond to radical social reorganizations or even totally distinct aesthetic movements. As I've noted in the past, we should be conscious of the ways that a fixation on changing surfaces can ignore structural stability, and ethical stagnation within a society.


University of Cultural Studies, Hanoi. Note how the cement pillars evoke a stilt house. The "traditional" roof shape over the stairs is reflected as a motif in the shape of the windows over the central section.

If we think of TDH Bach Khoa as a kind of modernist "end of architecture" approaching the unity of form and function, then the question of what-comes-next is interesting. I think it's clear that TDH Bach Khoa is not in fact anything like an "end of architecture" and that it has its particularities, local accommodations, even ornamentation, but in terms of understanding what follows its helpful of thinking of TDH Bach Khoa as a figure of high modernism: an experiment in creating rational architecture for a new Man, that mythic figure who has arrived at post-nationalism, stripped of the totems and illusions of his past mythologies and prepared to enter the last chapter of History.

Water elements (dry here in winter) and plantings are places among the stilts, creating a pastoral effect below the modern building.

Recreations of the Dong Son bronzes are affixed to a gate at the Bach Mai meeting house.

What happened however, as the revolution receded, was the emergence of a new architecture which re-populated the spaces emptied by high modernism. This new architecture sought to create a new architectural language which incorporated phantasmatic images and signs of an authentic (pre-colonial) past. The stilt house, the dinh (meeting house), and the chua (temple)
were appropriated as precisely these figures of tradition and authenticity. Though these had, in the revolutionary period, been understood as "feudal" in purely Marxist terms, they were now re-appraised. The Dong Son bronzes (dating from ~600 BC - ~300 AD) also became important symbols of this "authentic" past. Ironically, may of the bronzes of were discovered by colonial archaeologists in the 20th century.

People's Committee building Ha Noi, note the "stilts" as well the bamboo inspired bris-soleil (a la Ngo Viet Thu)

In actuality it's misleading to think of these forms as being important only after the aesthetic de-population of 1960's high modernism. The bronzes were an important symbol in nationalist discourses before independence from France. Ho Chi Minh famously associated his image with the stilt house behind the colonial governor's mansion rather than with the mansion itself and the message was clear: Western forms were colonial, decadent, and alien while "traditional" forms were authentic, anti-bourgeois, and national. In fact, the ways that "the indigenous" and "the modern" have been variously oppposed and hybridized throughout the 20th century are varied and complex.

A strange mix of styles.

The references at work here to stilt houses, bamboo, and the dong son bronzes represent yet another chapter in this interrelationship. Much of this Soviet and post-Soviet architecture is not particularly valued or loved, but I think it really merits some appreciation considering its strange commitment to these two fraught principles