woof!: Vietnamese Architecture

Showing posts with label Vietnamese Architecture. Show all posts

28.6.14

House for Trees 4.4

This project from Vo Trong Nghia Architects has just won the House of the Year award from AR (Architectural Review), and i thought i'd highlight it as my last entry of this architect's work, a firm i admire for their thoughtful interpretation of modernism within a regional cultural context.

What i found interesting about this project was the site plan, with the house appearing buried within a dense Ho Chi Minh City residential block. The house appears to make this voided, residual space it's own, turning on it's head the traditional Vietnamese courtyard which is an ordered gathering space, an outdoor room of sorts accessed by the adjacent rooms, by making the empty space the occupied space, and the fragmented residual space the equal of the planned courtyard, but now undifferentiated from the fragmented outside space.

Traditional Vietnamese house, Hanoi

House for Trees Site Plan
Space is the residual of the surrounding buildings.

Floor Plan
House is accessed from the space on the left.

That the house is composed of individual blocks of rooms scattered about the residual space, with trees planted above each, gives the feeling that the architect was almost embarrassed about occupying this space, though it's done in an ingenious way that also says "we're not really here". The trees say this isn't really a house, but a garden, a perverse version of paradise where one lives in the garden, but does so in concrete blocks.

Section

As you can see in the plan, the rooms of this house are apart from each other; one goes outside to move about the house, it truly knows no bounds except those that others have made for it.

The house also has an interesting subterranean feel to it, with the trees hinting at a ground plane that you live below, but also undecided about where that ground plane is, as the height of the planters varies with the function each box.

22.3.14

Stacking Green 3.4

Modernism seems obsessed with expressing the continuity between indoors and out, but in the tropical region of Vietnam, this was not a new concept, as traditional urban houses are often open to the street, such that the business interests of the occupants often offers a view into their living room; the division between public and private is a blurry one, as is that between indoors and out.

In this house by Vo Trong in Ho Chi Minh City, one finds the expected blurring between interior and exterior, but also an unexpected blurring between built and unbuilt, new and ancient, and a blurring of the line between ruin and occupied.

Facade

Ancient Cham ruin
Photo © G.

The facade isn't really a facade. It's ambiguous as to whether the thing is built or planted, as the planted takes up an equal amount of space, and the built doesn't seem to connect to other built, it exists as bands of material equal in prominence to the green, planted beds. Vietnamese cities are devoid, for the most part, of greenery, and the houses lack yards, though one can often see plantings hanging from balconies or windows. Vo Trong's planted facade offers an interesting take on this dilemma of urban Vietnam.

Stairwell, back of house

Views of the light well

Bathroom

All photos © Hiroyuki Oki

Plan level 2

Binh Duong School 1.4

Me face has lately been covered with flapping salmon over the recent architecture of Vo Trong Nghia Architects, of Vietnam. Partly i have a bias of interest since visiting the country and being awed by the place and people, but also i appreciate that this architect has been able to put a local/regional face on modernism that i wish were more pervasive (i.e. China, where the endless skyscrapers and museums by western architects could be anywhere on the planet, despite thousands of years of local place-making and precedent).

i've made a blog pile of a sampling of my favorite of their works to date. This is the first of 4.

Binh Duong School

While in Vietnam i was really taken with their schools, of which i saw a few elementary level ones. The schools in the US are like garrisons nowadays with their rampant security measures and isolation from the surroundings, so it was quite a pleasure to see the openness of the Vietnamese schools, of which no less a part is the climate, but regardless i saw an openness and communal quality that i've not seen in American schools (i used to do school work as an architect in New England).

Anyway, this school epitomizes the openness of the Vietnamese elementary school, with it's flowing spaces and ingenious "S" curve that allows for the building to both open to the street with an initial courtyard that then opens to a second, more private courtyard that opens to the landscape, where recreation is held. You can see from the image above the urban courtyard opening to the second, landscape courtyard beyond.

Site diagram

Site Plan

i think this is a beautiful synthesis of what a school should do; engage with the community while creating community among the students, and exposing them to landscape and fresh air and light.

Open corridor

Landscape courtyard

Precast concrete fins create enclosure and openness together

The pavers are both town and landscape. Such a nice opening to the tree..

Viet Gathering 2.4

Update: this project was just named project of the year by ARCASIA (2014).

The Dai Lai Conference Center by Vo Trong Nghia Architects is part of a resort outside Hanoi, located between Dai Lai lake and the mountains. The conference center sits alongside the entrance road to the resort.

One would expect a conference center to gather people together of shared interests to teach and learn from their peers. Upon arriving at the Dai Lai center, one is confronted with a great arcing stone wall, the form of which inherently suggests a circle, the ultimate collective, gathering geometry, and one that reiterates the curve of the road upon which one arrives. The stone wall, being stone, also suggests protection, shelter, separation, and connects to our shared primal history of stone walls as defensive constructions for towns and cities and provinces, such as the Great Wall up north.

The hilly landscape is manipulated to offer a dale of sorts, which becomes the entrance to the Center, as you can see below:

The surprise comes upon entering, where one finds not stone and rock, but the brick and bamboo of traditional Vietnamese villages, and the expected circle of stone turns out to be only an arc, and one only partially occupied by the center. What one finds, then, is that one was brought together not just with other people of similar interests, but after venturing out to the back of the complex, with the much larger rolling landscape collected by the arc, of which we are only a part, and a subservient part at that. The center acts to unite civic life with landscape, to bring together those things we think of as existing apart, the town and the landscape.