10-day forecast for Ho Chi Minh City on 30 March 2022 -- Centigrade temperatures
The monsoon is defined as the seasonal periods of prevailing wind in South and Southeast Asia. There are two monsoon seasons in southern Vietnam, corresponding to the seasons in Southeast Asia in general. The summer monsoon winds blow from the southwest, usually between mid-May and mid-October, while the winter monsoon winds blow from the opposite direction, from the northeast, from mid-October to mid-May. I have observed that the wind changes within one day between the seasons, and I have been tracking the dates of the wind changes for the last five years. Normally, once it changes, it stays that way consistently every day until the next season. As the normal change dates approach, I start scanning the skies to see which way the upper-level clouds are running.
The average date over the past five years in the Springtime for the Summer monsoon to begin is around 15 May. The average date for the wind change to the Winter monsoon is around 20 October, and has a higher range of variability than the close range of the Summer monsoon change.
Normally I would begin to scan the skies around 1 May. You look for the direction the upper-level clouds are running. The lower-level clouds are too variable, especially during approaching thunder storms. But this year, I noticed on 12 April that the winds had already shifted. I reviewed weather history data to determine that the wind shift must have occurred on 8 April this year. That makes it over a month early.
This is consistent with the early onset of the rainy season that we have been experiencing this year. I have observed that the rainy season (defined as rain at least every other day consistently for at least two weeks) usually starts three or four weeks in advance of the date of the monsoon wind change. The rainy season in southern Vietnam usually begins around 1 May and ends around 1 November. There are occasional rains during the normal dry season from November through April. But this year, the rainy season began in early March, making the rainy season two months early this year. The rainy season also begins with spectacular thunder and lightning storms, and we have had those in abundance through March until now in April.
My unscientific theory is that global warming has increased the width of the equatorial climate zone so that Ho Chi Minh City is now in that zone rather than the tropical monsoon zone. Thus the weather pattern in Ho Chi Minh City is beginning to look like Singapore’s. That is not good news for me.
I have not studied meteorology, so these observations and theories could be far off. I would be happy to consider any dissenting comments in the hopes of learning more about these phenomena.
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Mel Schenck (layered) and photographer Alexandre Garel welcome you to view the extraordinary modernist architecture of southern Vietnam. Please preview the projects and beautiful architectural photography for our new book "Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture" on our blog Architecture Vietnam.
Over the past eight decades since the Japanese occupation of Vietnam in WWII, southern Vietnamese architects developed a version of modernist architecture that accommodated the tropical climate and reflected the identity of a newly independent nation.
The vast quantity and quality of Vietnamese modernist buildings constructed throughout southern Vietnam made it a 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, especially for dwellings.
Mel Schenck and photographer Alexandre Garel are preparing the book that finally recognizes the outstanding accomplishment of the southern Vietnamese people in developing a Vietnamese modernist architecture that has become unique and special in the world.
My posting here a couple of days ago explained the architectural theory behind the design of my house in Ho Chi Minh City. However, sustainability was the most important consideration in designing the house.
© Oki Hiroyuki
The primary goal for this house is to provide a comfortable place for the architect and his family in retirement. Lots of light and air are desired to take advantage of the indoor/outdoor opportunities provided in this tropical climate. Natural ventilation is desired while minimizing air conditioning, so a large proportion of the exterior facades are given over to openings to let the breeze flow through.
© Oki Hiroyuki
French colonial and early modernist houses in Viet Nam had extensive vents at the tops of exterior and interior walls on each floor, and later used ceiling fans to move air through the openings. But most houses in Viet Nam over the past two decades have become more like caves as air conditioning became more available at a reasonable cost. Air conditioning requires contained environments, so openings have been eliminated and doors and windows remain closed.
© Oki Hiroyuki
This house has louver glass windows at the tops of all exterior and interior cross-walls to allow ventilation throughout the house as well as up the open stairway. The louver windows may be closed if necessary to allow air conditioning, but in practice, air conditioning is rarely required and the breezes move through the house at most times.
© Oki Hiroyuki
Windows and doors are opened during the daytime in most Vietnamese houses for ventilation, but they must be closed at night for security. In most houses, steel grids or screens are provided on the inside of all windows and doors. In this house, the steel grid envelops the house at the outside of all balconies, so windows and doors may remain open at all times if desired. The effect is like living in a bird cage instead of jail cells. The steel screens outside of the balconies thus extend the rooms to include the balconies.
© Oki Hiroyuki
Balconies are common on Vietnamese houses, but are usually rectangular at 1 meter wide, which only allows a chair or two. The exterior doors and windows and the balcony edges of this house are splayed at angles to allow tables and chairs at the 3-meter-wide ends of the balconies.
© Oki Hiroyuki
This combination of splayed balcony edges on each floor, as well as the steel security screens, provides opportunities for an architecture beyond modernism. The architect highly respects the uniquely Vietnamese modernist style for houses that Vietnamese architects have developed over the past 80 years. They continue to experiment with abstract compositions of lines, patterns, materials, textures, colors, shapes, and volumes. But these compositions are almost always orthogonal. This design is not.
© Oki Hiroyuki
The angular edges of the balconies, with each floor set back a meter from the one below, compels the steel grid to cascade down the four-storey face of the house, warping as it goes. The warping exhibits amorphousness, the pattern of the steel cross-bars expresses randomness, and the layering of the screens against the balconies and light shelves displays the dissonance of the information age. The complexity of the information age is thus expressed in a simple concept.
© Oki Hiroyuki
© Oki Hiroyuki
I am thankful to my architect assistant Ms. Nguyễn Thị Trà Giang for the design and colors of the stairs light well wall.
© Oki Hiroyuki
With the landscaping finally completed on my house in Ho Chi Minh City, I wanted to have the house photographed by a professional architectural photographer. Beyond posting a few snapshots of the house for my friends and relatives on Facebook, why would I want to photograph the house?
© Oki Hiroyuki
This project is definitely my last hurrah. In a 43-year career in architecture, I had never designed or worked on a house. My career roles have been primarily management of large projects rather than design, so this project has been special for me in validating whatever design talent I exhibited back in architecture schools a long time ago.
This house is my design experiment. I believe that architecture should represent the values and changes of contemporary times. Although trained as a modernist, I have long been interested in architecture fit for the information age. Recent large projects around the world, including museums, cultural centers, and government buildings, have clearly shown the direction for architecture in the information age. Designed by architects such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, they display many of the hallmarks of our times, including randomness, dissonance, and amorphousness. Such an architecture can really only be realised through computers and parametric software to deal with multiple variables required in the information age, resulting in complex free-form materials and forms.
But the design of houses has thus far escaped this movement, just as design of houses largely avoided modernism over the past 100 years. Houses around the world are usually either utilitarian or evocative of past cultures (e.g., Victorian or French Colonial). So this house is my experiment in illustrating the potential for information-age architecture in houses. And southern Viet Nam offers the easiest opportunity to apply these ideas because the form of the urban house in Viet Nam is rather constrained by the small lots and exposure to only one or two sides of the house. This is a good contemporary basis to start from because Vietnamese architects have perfected modernist architecture for houses.
© Oki Hiroyuki
This house is thus a modernist structure with an information-age face. Modernist rationality resulted in a simple reinforced-concrete structure with full-glass openings on the two four-storey end facades of the house. This accommodated the primary goal to take advantage of the indoor/outdoor living opportunities available in this tropical climate. Accordingly, the balconies on each floor are enlarged from the normal Vietnamese one meter rectilinear width to three meters on one end of the balconies to accommodate garden tables and chairs. This is accomplished by splaying the long sides of the balconies at angles to achieve the additional width.
© Oki Hiroyuki
This combination of splayed balcony edges on each floor, as well as the steel security screens, provides opportunities for an architecture beyond modernism. The angular edges of the balconies, with each floor set back a meter from the one below, compel the steel grid to cascade down the four-storey face of the house, warping as it goes. The warping exhibits amorphousness; the pattern of the steel cross-bars expresses randomness; and the layering of the screens against the balconies and light shelves display the dissonance of the information age. The complexity of the information age is thus expressed in a simple concept.
© Oki Hiroyuki
I will explain in a subsequent posting why I didn’t take these architectural photographs myself. All of the photographs posted here were produced by Oki Hiroyuki, the architectural photographer used often by the Vietnamese modernist architects that I respect.
© Oki Hiroyuki
© Oki Hiroyuki Vegetable roof garden
© Oki Hiroyuki
I am just finishing a MOOC course (Massive Open Online Course) through the University of Hong Kong, using the edX platform.
Following is the final paper I wrote for the course:
Through this course, “The Search for Vernacular Architecture of Asia”, I now know that the modernist shop houses (tube houses) of southern Viet Nam represent the vernacular architecture and vernacular landscape of southern Viet Nam. I would not have accepted this premise previous to this course.
I lead a seminar for Vietnamese architecture and planning students on behalf of the Huynh Tan Phat Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City. The purpose of the seminar is to increase the ability of the Foundations’s scholarship students to speak English in a professional setting, preparing them to present and advocate their ideas to future international professional firms, clients, or consultants.
Normally, one of the students presents at each seminar session, and then we discuss the student’s ideas. Occasionally, I present, and my presentation is entitled “Southern Vietnam is the Leading Location for Modernist Architecture in the World”. My students don’t believe this at first.
A copy of this slide presentation can be found on Slideshare.net at this link: http://www.slideshare.net/layered/vn-modernist-houses-0515
One of my foremost joys in life is living in Ho Chi Minh City. With a population currently of 10 million people, this city is one of the busiest and fastest-growing cities in Asia. The urban environment is a very intensive mix of commercial and residential uses, involving all of the senses. Coupled with tropical temperatures that encourage outdoor life, this creates an urban environment filled with people contributing their sounds, smells, and tastes to others. The range of street food, karaoke music, and retail sales along most streets is stimulating and invigorating. I love how this facilitates the natural sociability of the Vietnamese.
As an architect, I am particularly enamored by the modernist vernacular architecture of southern Viet Nam. For more than 80 years, architects and home-owners have experimented with materials, lines, volumes, colors, textures, and patterns within the standard four-meter wide five-storey tall urban shop house façade (called tube houses in Viet Nam). The result is a sophisticated evolution of modernist architecture that fits the tropical climate of Vietnam well within a constricted space. This variety of experimentation accentuates the intensity of urban life along the streets, and it represents the large majority of houses in the city.
What I did not know when I was thinking about this, and developing my presentation, is that this is the vernacular architecture of southern Viet Nam. Like most people, I had thought that vernacular architecture is a subset of traditional architecture, being where people live and work, rather than the elite historical monumental buildings often shown as examples of traditional architecture. Through Professor Lung’s course, I have come to understand that vernacular architecture is what the people of an area evolve and pass on to future generations to use and modify as necessary. Often, this vernacular architecture would be characterised as traditional. But the 80-years of evolution of modernist houses in southern Viet Nam fully represents the definition of vernacular architecture presented in this course.
Getting back to the reaction of my students to this idea that the greatest concentration of modernist houses in the world is here in their neighborhoods: they said that this is impossible — the architecture here in Viet Nam is ordinary. It can’t compare to the modernist masterpieces published daily in the architectural media from cities around the world in developed countries, notwithstanding the fact that Vietnamese architects won the top awards at the World Architectural Forum in Singapore this past year.
I tell them that it seems ordinary to them because they grew up with this environment. They have not traveled beyond Viet Nam yet. They have not seen that the vernacular shop houses of Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore are truly ordinary and plain. Now I realize that this ordinariness is also a hallmark of vernacular architecture. The modernist houses of southern Viet Nam are a richer version of ordinary.
Even in 1972, when I took this photograph, the majority of the vernacular houses were modernist
This older street in Ho Chi Minh City is predominately modernist
This newer street in Ho Chi Minh City shows recent modernist vernacular houses
Vietnamese modernism makes greater use of colors and articulation
This rural house in a Mekong Delta province combines modernism with traditional form
I am proud to live in a modernist vernacular neighborhood like this in Ho Chi Minh City
The early development pattern of Sài Gòn was influenced primarily by means of transportation. The native population built the earliest settlements along the river banks where trade was facilitated by boat and barge shipping. The Vietnamese further developed the marine transportation system in the late 1700s by digging canals into the interior from the rivers to bring commerce into the central area of Sài Gòn and link to the important Chinese commercial market of Chợ lớn southwest of downtown Saigon. What are now the major wide streets of downtown Sài Gòn were additional wide canals built by the French in the early 1800s.
The canals later lost value after the French built railroads and tramways leading further inland from the rivers and to the north and south of the country. The central canals became recognised as a health hazard, and were filled in during the late 1800s to become the major streets. The two major canals remaining through the city continue to fulfil an important function in absorbing tidal flooding from the Sài Gòn River.
The current road pattern in the inner-city districts of Hồ Chí Minh City was established by the French to link important military and commercial facilities. The major road crossings featured large roundabouts with significant sculptural monuments.
As is typical of most cities, development spread linearly along the roads, leaving agricultural lands in-between the roads, that were later developed for residential use. The first beltway road was built by the Americans in 1971 and 72 around the north and west of the city to divert north-south commercial traffic from the inner-city. The beltway was constructed through agricultural lands with no other development within sight.
Nowadays, the beltway is surrounded by commercial and residential development, and it allowed development of new districts of the city beyond the beltway, extending to Cù Chi.
Residential development followed the patterns of the past and the remainder of the country in terms of narrow small lot sizes, featuring an average of only 4 meters of street or lane frontage. The change over time has been an increase in height and density through the constant renewal in the neighborhoods. Since the American War years, the average height of residential structures has increased from 2 to 3 stories to 4 to 5 stories in the inner city districts. Commercial and residential high-rise buildings spread around the inner and outer city districts along major commercial streets have arisen partly because the city has been unable to make up its mind about what to build downtown. These commercial buildings have been negotiated with the district authorities based upon what is the most that can be built on a given site for a reasonable cost. There has been a general zoning criteria of a limit of 8 stories in most areas and 12 stories at major intersections.
The French and American wars transplanted many rural people to squatter neighborhoods at the edges of the inner city. In the war years from 1950 to 1975, the city population swelled from a half-million to over two million people. Since the wars, rural people have continued to flood into the city in search of jobs and opportunities. The Phú Nhuận district neighborhood between downtown and the airport, for example, was full of squatter shacks that appropriated small pieces of land along access lanes that were unplanned and were established as new families moved in. That is why the lanes between the major streets have no rational pattern.
Then over time, the initial flimsy shacks were replaced with one-story masonry houses of the same land size. Then a few years later, these small houses were replaced with two-story structures as families grew. More recently, these structures are being replaced by five-story structures. There is constant renewal like this in all of the neighborhoods, and this is a major engine of economic growth of the city.
As the Vietnamese experienced their version of the baby-boom after the wars, population projections have indicated and proven an exponential rise in population. The planning authorities of Hồ Chí Minh City have therefore instituted master plans for several new urban areas, beginning with the Saigon South area around 2000 to accommodate a million habitants. The Phú Mỷ Hưng area is the first major suburb in the Saigon South area. Subsequently, the city has planned for a new central business district to be constructed on wetlands across the Sài Gòn River, called Thủ Thiêm. Other new urban areas include the Northwest Metropolitan area around Cù Chi, and relatively unplanned expansion is occurring in the urban districts east of Thủ Thiêm due to the construction of new highways to serve a planned new international airport as well as busy port facilities along the Dồng Nai River.
Some of the most successful expansions of development in Hồ Chí Minh City have been urban infill. Until the 1990s, there was a large wetlands area north of the Thị Nghè canal between the Phú Nhuận and Bình Thạnh Districts.
Since the area was surrounded by the city and became highly polluted, the area was drained and filled in to provide a large new urban area that has now been fully developed into one of the most vibrant inner-city neighbourhoods along Phan Xích Long street, which itself was created by a large storm-drainage project in 1972.
The next generator of urban growth and form will be along the transit corridors created by a new metro subway system currently being planned.
Gerhard Kallmann died at age 97 in Boston this past week (19 June 2012), with his obituary published in the New York Times this weekend. Along with Michael McKinnell and Edward Knowles, Kallman won the design competition for the new Boston City Hall in 1963 while the three architects were teaching at Columbia University in New York City. Subsequently they formed the architectural firm Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles to produce the building, which was completed in 1969.
Photo above by Daniel Schwen, 2010, under Creative Commons 3.0 license
Described as "brutalist modernism", the label is accurate insofar as brutalism is characterized by raw concrete and other materials that form blocky elements of the building that express the functions of the building within. In its most literal form, the exposed reinforced concrete exhibits the rough surfaces of the boards used to form the concrete in place.
The Boston City Hall is a premier example of this style because the form of the building expresses quite literally the spaces within. The lower levels and lobbies grow out of the surrounding brick plaza and are clad in the same color brick, showing accessiblity to the public functions within. The brick plaza extends through the ground flooor of the building. The ceremonial spaces such as the council chambers, exhibit hall, and the mayor's office, are expressed in the protruding blocks mid-level in the building, reaching out to the people. The administrative offices are contained in the upper two floors which are inclosed in a repetitive pattern of dentils.
As the delegate of our university student chapter, I attended the annual convention of the American Institute of Architects in Boston in May of 1969, shortly after the building's opening. I was enthralled by the building, and took three 36-expoure rolls of Kodachrome slides inside and out. My parents were appalled at the expanse of exposed concrete and couldn't understand why I liked the building. They were precursers of many Americans who didn't understand the building and considered it ugly. As stated in ArchDaily's article on the building, "the mayor of Boston had actually filed a petition [in 2006] to have the building destroyed in order to make way for a better, more efficient building that was 'aesthetically pleasing'.”
Since my trip to Boston in 1969 was one of my first forays out of the state of Montana, this building became the major influence on my architectural and urban planning education. This trip began my transformation from country kid to urbanist, as I understood for the first time why monumental buildings such as this should be an intregral part of the urban fabric. This building, growing out of its plaza with direct relationships to the federal and state buildings across the plaza, expressed for me the nature of American government in its releationship with the people. I also understood for the first time the place of architecture to express the times of the people and cultures it serves -- this building displays the rambunctious energy of the people of Boston renewing their participation in the government and the renewal of their city in planning this area and this monumental building that serves them.
I particulary was impressed how the interior lobby spaces related so well to the plaza and exterior of the building, and were soaring spaces that were breath-taking.
Kallman was quoted in the book "Architects on Architecture" by Paul Heyer (1978):
'We distrust and have reacted against an architecture that is absolute, uninvolved and abstract. We have moved towards an architecture that is specific and concrete, involving itself with the social and geographic context, the program, and methods of construction, in order to produce a building that exists strongly and irrevocably, rather than an uncommitted abstract structure that could be any place and, therefore, like modern man— without identity or presence."
All photos except first photo are from Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons license.
As I have said before in this blog, Vietnam has some of the finest modernist residential architecture found anywhere in the world. Vietnamese architects have refined rich versions of modernism over six decades, and the density of high quality modernist architecture for houses is much higher in Việt Nam than in other places of the world.
While only 35 years old (in 2012), the Vietnamese architect Võ Trọng Nghĩa is the most famous of the Vietnamese architects designing masterpieces at this time. I wrote previously about Mr. Nghĩa's Elip Café back in 2009. That café is constructed almost entirely of bamboo formed into structural elements and enclosures to form an ellipse for the cafe. Mr. Nghĩa has designed several projects using bamboo as the primary element, culminating in the Vietnam Pavilion for the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. This project is shown in the photo below, published on Mr. Nghĩa's website.
Now the New York Times has published Mr. Nghĩa's masterpiece of modernist residential architecture constructed recently in District 2 of Ho Chi Minh City. This article, written by the Hanoi-based free-lance writer Mike Ives, also features a beautiful slide show of the exterior and interior of the house. The headline for the article, "In Vietnam, a Traditional Home Design Goes Green", is somewhat misleading. While the house configuration is standard in Việt Nam, the style is definitely not traditional unless one recognizes that modernism represents the most common style for houses in southern Việt Nam.
What Mr. Nghĩa calls the "Stacking Green House" is actually the standard configuration "tube house" common to all areas of Việt Nam. On a standard 4-meter wide by 20-meter long lot, the typical tube house rises four or five stories, with blank walls on the adjacent lots. Therefore the tube houses often seem like stacked caves, and the front facade and the rooftop is the only opportunity for design expression.
Mr. Nghĩa has perforated the interior configuration using light wells to break up the interior spaces and provide light through to a courtyard on the ground floor. But the primary innovation is the use of concrete planters stacked across the facades to allow ventilation through the facades to the interior spaces within while maintaining privacy for the occupants.
There is rarely a natural view from a house in dense Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City, so an unobstructed view out windows is not really necessary. The rooftop terraces offer exterior views when wanted. Mr. Nghĩa has provided in this house what is really necessary: natural plants across the openings on each floor that allow ventilation while screening out the dust. The result is a house that does not feel like a cave and has an abundance of filtered light.
The front elevation is a simple composition of only two elements: white concrete and plantings. The organizing idea is minimalist while accomplishing the environmental goals. The seemingly random spacings of the concrete planters are actually set by the growing heights of the pre-selected plantings.
This Vietnamese house thus exemplifies what is best about modernist architecture: it is a thoughtful response to the goals for the uses within, and then applies a very simple idea to achieve the goals with a pleasing composition.
All photographs shown here (except the Vietnam Pavilion) are by © Hiroyuki Oki and are published on Mr. Nghĩa's website, the above referenced New York Times article, ArchDaily on 20 January 2012, and the "yellow trace" blog on 30 January 2012.
Long-time Việt Nam bloggers will remember Doug Young's blog, Virtual-Doug. He wrote extensively and beautifully about Việt Nam when he lived in Huế for a year and a half in 2005-2006. Since then, he and his wife Cindy have returned to Việt Nam several times, and Doug has accumulated a collection of beautiful photographs as well as experiences. He has continued to write about Việt Nam people and culture on his blog through the subsequent years from his retirement home in Texas, USA. Doug and Cindy also brought Việt Nam to their home by sponsoring a couple of Vietnamese young people to attend nearby graduate schools in Texas. Over the past few years, Doug has given us an opportunity in his blog to hear about the reactions of these young Vietnamese to life and culture in America.
Doug and Cindy are both veterans of the Vietnam War (known as the American War in Việt Nam), and Doug has been been exploring the misconceptions most Americans have accumulated about Việt Nam due to the long-held memories and media coverage of the war. Few veterans have written about Việt Nam as a country and as a people. Meanwhile Việt Nam has changed substantially as a modern developing country. Doug has filled that breech with a well-written book now available on Amazon. The book is titled Same River, Different Water: A Veteran's Journey from Vietnam to Viet Nam. The book also contains Doug's many beautiful color photographs, so it is not available in digital formats, such as Kindle.
Vietnam is defined by the war in American eyes. Việt Nam is the real country and its people, changed far beyond the war. Following is a review I contributed to the book's page on Amazon:
Same River, Different Water: A Veteran's Journey from Vietnam to Viet Nam is not a book about the Vietnam War (referred to as the American War in Viet Nam). Nor is it a collection of war stories. Rather, it is written by an American Vietnam War veteran to help change American perceptions derived from the Vietnam War, and to point us towards the modern developing country of Viet Nam. This is a book about American people and culture in relation to Vietnamese people and culture.
Douglas Young is an excellent writer, and he uses insightful stories to help us get beyond our old memories of the Vietnam war, and see a very much changed Viet Nam. Doug and his wife Cindy spent a year and a half living and teaching in Viet Nam, and they bring to us a Viet Nam most Americans either would not think about or imagine. Using beautiful photographs and excellent writing, they use their experiences there as a means to show the misconceptions Americans share, and how much Viet Nam has changed beyond those misconceptions.
Doug Young shows us that Viet Nam is a place worth returning to, visiting, or living in.
I highly recommend purchasing and reading this book, because it opens our eyes beyond the stereotypes we may have accumulated because of the war or our western culture.
The normal niche for this blog is modernist architecture for Vietnamese houses. But I am currently in America, and I got to thinking about what how the typical architecture of American houses might be characterized.
There is a list of a hundred architectural house styles on Wikipedia, and I have seen examples of most of them in my travels around America and the world. As I was driving from California to Montana through Oregon, Washington, and Idaho recently, I noticed that the predominate house style, especially in the western states, is not on the list. If you think about it, what we remember in terms of house styles are memorable houses -- often large houses constructed and owned by the upper economic strata of society. Architects often design these houses with the distinctive styles listed. We ignore the normal common bland houses that most of us live in. Builders design these houses rather than architects. We don't even "see" them although they are ubiquitous.
In the western United States, the standard house is a simple rectangle in plan with a hipped or gabled roof with wide overhangs. Here is an example of one, built in Billings, Montana in the 1950s.
These houses were built everywhere following World War 2 in conjunction with the American baby boom. They are small (1,000 square feet or 93 sq. meters), with an unfinished basement in the northern states. Therefore they were cheap to build using the easily-available wood framing materials common in America.
The closest architectural style on the list is the ranch style, characterized as single-story with low rooflines. Although the typical ranch style house has an attached garage, many of the standard houses do not. Owners often added detached garages on their large lots later in life.
In my writings about Vietnamese houses, I have noted that they are a response to the context and conditions of Viet Nam. They are adapted to small narrow lots in densely-populated cities and towns. They use the ubiquitous masonry materials easily available in Vietnam. The typical American house is low and spread out, adapting to the much larger lot sizes available in low-density American suburbs, towns, and rural areas. They also reflect the much smaller family sizes of America where children starting their own families rent or buy separate houses, and the grandparents have their own houses or have moved to retirement communities. The American houses are simple and bland, which makes them affordable and usable.
I am honored to be linked by Ourman in Hanoi as one of his favorite blogs in his latest post. He makes the point that links in blog posting make the blog world worth paying attention to, beyond social media. I had an enjoyable holiday afternoon following the other links in his posting, leading to some very good writing as well as topical information. For example, Ourman pointed to the Travelfish Hanoi blog, which indeed featured the well-written articles he likes. But I disagree with him that the articles are targeted to tourists -- I think they offered information that expats would do well to consider.
That led me to think that Travelfish's Saigon blog might be interesting too, so I pointed at that and found several recent articles by Angela Schonberg that offered significant advice to expats, such as her article on dealing with the traffic police if pulled over on your motorbike. This illustrates the point that the links in blogs are valuable in exposing us to sites and writing that we might not have otherwise found. Normally I wouldn't go looking for travel sites, but this site offers the kind of good advice about life in Ho Chi Minh City that I do look for, with good writing quality in addition. But these kind of information-oriented blogs are difficult to find behind all of the commercial results found in Google searches, especially about travel. Twitter and Facebook do provide a good service for me in acting as a portal to similar blog postings for newspaper articles.
I use Twitter and Facebook to keep up to date with my friends -- Twitter for expat friends, and Facebook for U.S. friends and relatives. But it is through my blog that I can provide some information they might enjoy that doesn't fit either of those two formats. In the end, the tweets and the status updates are very ephemeral -- they are not easily found once the day goes by. I know they can be found through search, but why bother? Their information is too tied to the day they were published.
Blogs present information that is more timeless and much more easily found again through search buttons on the blog or category reads. I know when I want information on street food I can find it easily on Sticky Rice by Mark Lowerson for Hanoi and Down the Street and Back Again for HCMC by John Russack. Both are some of the best expat writers in Viet Nam.
And speaking of good writers, I am amazed at the quality of thinking and writing in English in the postings on the blog Quynh Nguyen (Alcoholic Butter) by a young Vietnamese woman, Nguyen Bao Nhu Quynh.
Our Man also wrote that "Links continue to power Google so we can find all this stuff." When Steve Jackson of Our Man started his blog in 2004, and I started my blog in 2006, blogs were fairly new, and so was the scope of the internet. My postings regularly came up on top of topical Google searches such as "Saigon houses". Today, my blog comes up seven pages behind a slew of real estate websites. But that is the internet today, and I am thankful for its growth.
It hasn't helped my Google page rank by not posting for months on end. My task must be to get back into the groove and start pumping out good information on Vietnamese modernist architecture regularly.
I think this building was constructed as an excuse to rent out a very prominent large billboard sign.
This building is located facing Đường Xuân Diệu on the corner with Đường Hoàng Văn Thù across from the smallish and outdated Ho Chi Minh City International Exhibition and Convention Center in the Tân Bình district. The convention center block is probably one of the largest round-a-bouts in the world, with traffic moving around it counter-clockwise. Traffic on Đường Hoàng Văn Thù is one-way to the northeast moving towards this sign/building, as shown in the photo below taken 300 meters up the street. The current graphics of the sign are rather low-key since the green doesn't contrast with the sky.
This building started construction about two years ago, but was just recently completed. Work stopped for several months last year. In the photo below taken a year ago, I wondered at the time about the economics of the small floor areas, as well as the apparent flimsiness of the structure.
Since Saigon is in an earthquake zone of low incidence and magnitude, the structure is adequate, but much flimsier than a building in San Francisco or Tokyo, for example. However, this building is one of the cheapest buildings I have seen anywhere, irrespective of the amount of glass used on the facade. The detailing of the glass curtain wall is about as spare as any system I have every seen. There isn't much to this building other than the concrete frame, the brick back walls, and the glass curtain walls.
Since the glazing is not double-glazed for insulation, nor is the glass likely to be a high-tech low-e (emissivity) glass to reduce solar gain, the spaces in this greenhouse must get extremely hot, causing a large air-conditioning load.
Nevertheless, the building is a good example of the excellent modernist architecture common for buildings like this in Ho Chi Minh City.
I now have two bee honeycombs outside my office window here in the Tân Bình district of Ho Chi Minh City.
The upper comb has been there for over a year.
A couple of weeks ago, some bees split off and started building the lower honeycomb. The bees never swarm, and my windows are always closed to keep the air conditioning in, so they do not bother anybody, and we leave them alone. I am impressed with their choice of location in the bougainvillea vine -- the honeycombs are sheltered from heavy rain by the tree branches and the building overhangs, and they do not get direct hot sun because of the shading of the leaves and flowers. My view from the window has long been obstructed by the growth of the vine, so I don't mind the new bulk of the honeycombs.
In the two years while I have been negligent in posting here, modernist architecture in Ho Chi Minh City has flourished. I used to say that Vietnamese architects are masters of modernist architecture for houses, but haven't been able to apply it to larger buildings.
But I have been finding excellent modernist mid-size buildings lately out in the neighborhoods of Saigon. This building is located at 15 Đồng Đa in Phường 2 of the Tân Bình district, out by the airport.
This facade demonstrates a very simple but well-articulated pattern of window mullions and floor spandrels while remaining very glassy. This is a very clean and simple solution for an office building, and provides and elegant image for the tenants. This building is also unusual in providing windows on the sides. Most buildings of this size out in the neighborhoods have blank walls, providing a cave-like environment within. Therefore the working environment for the tenants in this building is probably much more productive with the availability of natural light.
Long time no blog postings, but I would like to get back into it. I am spending a couple of months in America, visiting my 94-year-old father in Helena, Montana. I hope to return to Viet Nam is a month or so and will begin posting about modernist architecture in Ho Chi Minh City again.
I drove my father to the university city of Missoula, Montana, a few days ago so he could attend a performance of Riverdance with my brother and his wife. Since I am not a fan of such music and dance, I opted not to go to the performance and decided to climb Mount Sentinel adjacent to the University of Montana. Missoula is a very green city nestled among the mountains.
Back in Montana, I have been reminded of the very long freight trains that run the American rails every day. From the vantage point of Mount Sentinel, I watched four long freight trains moving through the city's downtown over an hour's period.
These freight trains feature up to a hundred cars, and are often cars of the same type carrying probably the same type of freight, like the cars in this train, shown from the engines in the front to the rear of the train.
During this time, I did not see any passenger trains since Amtrak, the American passenger train company, does not run through the center of Montana -- it runs along the border with Canada in northern Montana. This contrasts with the rail system in Vietnam, which features passenger trains only, and very little freight is carried. Therefore what I am showing to my Vietnamese friends here is something many Americans take for granted -- the long freight trains constantly moving through the American countryside.
Steve Jackson recently posted a well-discussed (read the comments) essay on his blog Our Man in Hanoi wondering about the excesses of wealthy expats and Vietnamese in Vietnam, and where this wealth comes from. As he said, "I can understand poverty here. It’s the wealth I don’t get."
My own response agreed, but I have been more interested in the circumstances of the growing middle class in Viet Nam, since I essentially live under similar conditions here in Ho Chi Minh City.
@caligarn, @saigoninacup, and myself (@layered) recently carried out a short conversation about this topic on Twitter. @caligarn, author of the blog Mẹ Ơi, Việt Nam Ơi stated "But Vietnamese middle income families have a deeply different standard of living to American middle income families, for example." I disagreed with that, citing my own observations, such as the proliferation of home computers in my middle class Saigon neighborhood. @saigoninacup, author of the blog Saigon In A Cup, then pointed out that Vietnamese middle class families usually don't have cars and find it difficult to buy houses, which is true. @caligarn, via @tamkaizen, cited a good website tool to explore these issues: Numbeo, a database of the cost of living for international cities.
@tamkaizen stated that he would be broke in the U.S. with the salary he is making in Viet Nam, which is true if his salary is comparable to Vietnamese middle class salaries. What is important to note is local purchasing power, which means he may be living comfortably on his salary in Vietnam even if it wouldn't be sufficient in America. My own salary here in Viet Nam is lower than what I would make in America, but I sense that I can buy so much more with it here in Viet Nam (except for automobiles and land).
Using the Numbeo website, here are some conclusions about the relative standard of living between America and Viet Nam:
1. According to Numbeo, the median monthly disposable salary (after taxes) in Viet Nam is US$653, while in the United States it is US$2,909, or US$34,908 annually (reported by Wolfram/Alpha to be $33,190 in 2009). I think it is reasonable to assume that the median monthly disposable salary level represents the middle class in both countries. This means that the median salary in the U.S. is 4.45 times the median salary in Viet Nam.
2. Numbeo reports that the Consumer Price Index plus rent in Viet Nam is half of the U.S. index, meaning we can buy a similar basket of goods in Viet Nam for half the price of the same basket in the U.S. However, the World Bank International Comparison Program puts the Price Level Index for Viet Nam at 30 against the U.S. Index of 100. So if prices in the U.S. are three times that of the Viet Nam, but the salaries are 4.45 times higher, the Vietnamese cannot sustain the same standard of living as in America.
3. Because of this disparity between salaries and the price of the common basket of goods, Numbeo reports that local purchasing power in the U.S. is 123.7% higher than in Viet Nam. So I was wrong in disagreeing with @caligarn's contention that Vietnamese middle income families have a deeply different standard of living to American middle income families. They have to have a lower standard of living in order to live within the limits of their income.
4. However, my observation of several items in the Numbeo "basket of goods" leads me to think that the standard of living is more similar than the numbers indicate. I know you can rent a 140 square meter house (3 bedrooms) in a Ho Chi Minh City Vietnamese neighborhood away from inner city districts 1 and 3 for US600/month, while the Numbeo figure is US$1,169 outside the city center. This brings up an important point -- these cost-of-living calculators are targeted towards people who want to relocate to a foreign country and need to calculate their potential costs in order to negotiate salaries and benefits as expat employees. So the expectation is that such a person will want to live in accommodations similar to their home country and amongst other expats. Therefore the costs shown in Numbeo are probably gathered in expat neighborhoods. In Ho Chi Minh City, that includes Thảo Điên or An Phù in District 2, or Phú Mỹ Hưng in District 7. The Vietnamese middle class does not live in those neighborhoods. If you live in a Vietnamese neighborhood, you see a lower price structure for similar goods.
Another way to look at the standard of living issue is the poverty threshold or rate. The poverty rate in a country is "the minimum level of income deemed necessary to achieve an adequate standard of living in a given country" (Wikipedia). The adequacy is measured by a basket of basic goods necessary for life, including the obvious food and housing. There are undoubtedly differences in different countries as to what are considered basic necessities. But assuming the CIA uses some consistency, the World Fact Book lists the U.S. at 12% of the population below the poverty threshold in 2004 (probably has risen over the economic crisis), and 12.3% for Viet Nam in 2009. This implies that there is at least some similar starting point for comparing the cost of living between America and Viet Nam.
This is a remarkable achievement for Viet Nam considering the poverty level was 58.1% in 1990.
The modernist house shown below is very simple in form and execution.
It is definitely not minimalist, though. The yellow accent color contrasted with the black facade at the lower floor provide plenty of interest in this composition. Since the lot is skewed to the street, the designer could add articulation in the facade with a projecting side and a receding side. Other than the articulation and the accent colors, this is a very fine simple composition. I would be proud to live here.
Unlike most Saigon houses, the entry floor architecture is part of the composition. Usually the lower floor is a commercial space so the entry facade is totally unrelated to the facade composition above. In this case, the house is not on a commercial street and therefore the entry is an integral part of family life in this house.
This house is on 14th Street (Đường Số 14) in District 6 of Ho Chi Minh City.
Eric Burdette has a very interesting post up on his blog As I See It regarding Pre-'75 Music in Viet Nam. He provides several links to audio files from the Vietnamese music website nhaccuatui.com, and YouTube videos. These files feature various Vietnamese rock bands from the 60s and early 70s. These are generally covers of famous American and British bands and tunes from that period, including the Beatles. These tunes are sung to the original tune with Vietnamese lyrics from translations.
One of the things I think I have learned about Vietnamese in the five years I have lived here is that they are very curious and eclectic. They look for good ideas, and when they find them, they grab them and improve on them. This is the essence of Vietnamese modernist design of houses that I have featured before on this blog (I hope to get back to the subject soon).
I think that is the case with the classic rock music that Eric presents in his posting. This music was played by the Armed Forces Radio station here in Saigon, and recordings were readily available to Americans at the PX's (post exchange) around the country. Whatever could be found in the PX could also be found on the black market, so musically-inclined Vietnamese (and most Vietnamese are very musically-inclined) had many sources for inspiration in the international music of the time flooding the market. In addition, there were many Vietnamese students attending American universities and military schools at the time, and they undoubtedly brought back recordings for their friends in South Vietnam.
But Eric laments that this part of Vietnamese history is not being preserved and that Vietnamese young people today may not know of this music. However I think the fact that this music is available on one of the most popular Vietnamese music websites makes it likely that many Vietnamese young people have played some of these tunes at least once. Some of my young coworkers know the same tunes from more contemporary covers, but do not necessarily know of the bands and singers from the war period. But my coworkers are real hunters and are constantly asking me about American groups from the 50s and 60s that they have found on YouTube. They have probably also found the Vietnamese groups but don't think to ask me about them (and I would not have been able to help them).
Even though I was in Saigon as a naval officer for a year in 1971-1972, I did not hear this music due to the particular circumstances in which I worked and lived. I was living amongst a small group of older American officers and working with older Vietnamese construction contractors and inspectors. What I realize now is that I missed what has turned out to be one of the great productive periods of Vietnamese music.
When I ask my coworkers what kind of music they like, they say they listen to all kinds of Vietnamese and international music, including the famous singers and bands of America. When I ask them what their favorite music is, they often say that it is the pre-1975 music of Trịnh Công Sơn. Most of his 600 songs are melancholy songs of love or are anti-war, sentiments which remain very applicable today. Many of his songs are extremely beautiful and recognizable to anyone that frequents the cafes of Ho Chi Minh City. There is a cafe in Tân Phú District on Au Cơ Street that is named Cafe Trịnh Công Sơn and plays his music and has live singers on weekends.
On the nhaccuatui.com music website, you can find Trịnh Công Sơn music under the label "Nạch Trịnh" under the "Thể loại" tab. This is a Vietnamese-language website only. The database of songs is enormous and intimidating because each song may have been sung by many different singers over the years, and there are different versions by the same singer. One way to start is by choosing a particular singer such as Khánh Ly, Hồng Nhung, or Quang Dũng and clicking through the Trịnh Công Sơn songs performed by them.
Any easier introduction to Trịnh Công Sơn music can be found at the English-language commemoration website Trịnh Công Sơn. Click on the "nhạc" button (RealPlayer required). Another good website is TCS-Home.
My favorite Trịnh Công Sơn songs are Biển Nhở
and Tuổi đá buồn
Chris Harvey of the blog Charvey in Vietnam has an interesting posting and photo about a beautiful historic building in District 3 of Ho Chi Minh City. He laments the neglect and disrepair or potential demolition of these old buildings. He also feels Vietnamese citizens feel reticent to talk about pre-1975 issues such as old buildings.