Vietnamese Vernacular Modernism Is a Local Language Created by the Ordinary People
The characteristics of Vietnamese modernism invite us to reconsider how architectural value is understood. It is not only the “scholarly” architecture practiced by a few, but rather the popular practice that best reflects the built environment’s cultural and geographical codes. Contrary to a kind of formalism theorized by a private group, Vietnamese vernacular modernism is achieved by the masses, from the bottom up, growing naturally as a language system — a living cultural substance that transforms, matures, and evolves according to the community in which it is spoken, a process that gives form to ideas, styles, and tastes, reflecting that community’s singular relationship with reality.
Vernacular modernism in Vietnam offers a different way to look at architecture history. One has to briefly forget rigid architectural principles to look at design and build as a social and cultural phenomenon. The anonymous speakers of this architectural language were also the anonymous authors of the vast majority of the built environment. Unlike institutional modernism, it gives us a break from elitist and privileged architectural currents to look at the beauty of everyday people’s ordinary “speech.” In doing so, it advocates for the unofficial and unnoticed in architectural history. It pushes us to think not only outside the “scientistic” sphere of architecture, but also beyond the commonly known modernist centers of the world, to consider architecture as an ordinary yet fundamental activity of human expression.
Reading Development 