Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture
by Mel Schenck with photography by Alexandre Garel
In the mid-twentieth century, southern Vietnamese architects developed a
version of modernist architecture that accommodated the tropical climate and
reflected the identity of a newly-independent culture. It demonstrated the innate
sense of design of Vietnamese and it represented the outlook of the southern
Vietnamese people as they looked towards the future, even in the face of war.
The vast quantity and quality of Vietnamese modernist buildings constructed
throughout southern Vietnam made Vietnam an unrecognized center of
modernism in the world. Most importantly, the southern Vietnamese as a
culture embraced modernism, and it became the vernacular architecture of the
culture for dwellings.
