"Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture" features beautiful architectural photography that illustrates the outstanding accomplishment of the people of southern Vietnam in developing a mid-century modernist architecture that is extraordinary in the world. Especially for Americans, Vietnam has been a war instead of a country. The world didn’t notice that the Vietnamese were simultaneously constructing modern apartment buildings, houses, large public buildings, and public housing as they developed a new nation. And the world didn’t anticipate that this architecture would be so overtly modernist rather than an adaption of traditional Vietnamese designs to the continuation of colonial architecture. 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 demonstrates the innate sense of design of Vietnamese and it represented the outlook of the people of southern Vietnam 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. This architecture features an interplay between masses and voids that provides a much more vibrant version of modernist architecture. This style fills the gaps between the functionalism of the International Style and the quest for identity and spirit that has been lacking in modernism worldwide. American architect Mel Schenck is a long-term immigrant to Vietnam and has been studying this architecture since he was surprised by the extent and quality of modernist architecture in Saigon when he first lived there in 1971/72. He and photographer Alexandre Garel accumulated a database of 400 buildings and 4,000 photographs in southern Vietnam to serve a comprehensive analysis of the history and characteristics of this distinctive architecture. Architectural historians, aficionados of modernist architecture, and anyone interested in Vietnamese culture will find that this book is a positive story about Vietnamese aspirations for independence and the value of modernist architecture in living in the world today.

"Poetic Significance" presents beautiful architectural photography, diagrams, and the history of the very rich and complex Vietnamese modernist architecture from the mid-century in Saigon, Vietnam. Vietnamese mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture made its way into the Vietnamese vernacular culture to be recreated and transformed by the ordinary people. Through their creations, this book tries to discern the modern architectural aesthetics of the Vietnamese people which reflects how the architecture of Vietnam, an ancient Southeast Asian culture, has appeared and developed in modern times. When asked about Vietnamese architectural identity, most people would associate Vietnamese identity with the period before the French colonisation, comprising the traditional architecture of wooden communal houses or imperial palaces. That is widely accepted. But less known, yet more significant, is that this very same identity of Vietnamese authenticity has made its way into modern times, surviving colonialism to thrive again in a new material reality. Vietnamese modernist architecture appeared in Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam during the Second Indochina War. It was a branch of modernism with a rich architectural vocabulary of various micro-climatic strategies. As a result, this architecture appears lighter, airier, more graceful and less monumental in comparison to global modernism. Unexpectedly, the ordinary Vietnamese people took this language and practiced it on their own in making their modernist shophouses. This created a modernist architecture without acknowledging it, and modernism then became a means, catalysed and enriched by the collectivity of the Vietnamese culture. It became a new tradition of building houses. And primary in this tradition is a distinctively vibrant and poetic taste. In response to the rationality of global modernism, the Vietnamese people realised a new branch of modernism that is intensively dense, yet vibrant, rich, abstract and thoroughly poetic. It demonstrated a focus on the feelings and the spirituality that architecture can have. This very special sensitivity of the Vietnamese people contrasted with global modernism. And this contrast is, in fact, the modern identity of Vietnamese architecture, rooted directly from Vietnamese traditional aesthetics. It deserves, therefore, a formal recognition and appreciation, especially domestically as globalisation raises questions of self-consciousness, authenticity and identity in Vietnam's society. Those who study, practice architecture or who are interested in design, art, history and culture will find that this book shows how modernism came to be in Vietnam and how it has been adopted by the people directly as their new vernacular architecture. Through simple yet frequently-used architectural elements like louvers, planters, pergolas, handrails, brise-soleil, columns, beams, etcetera, the Vietnamese people have crafted artworks of an authentic taste and a strong identity. Readers will find this work helpful as a handbook that exposes a bright, but hidden example for the world of how architecture, art and culture co-exist in southern Vietnam, and how rationality and spirituality are intertwined into human creations.

Following a decade of U.S. bombing campaigns that obliterated northern Vietnam, East Germany helped Vietnam rebuild in an act of socialist solidarity. In Building Socialism Christina Schwenkel examines the utopian visions of an expert group of Vietnamese and East German urban planners who sought to transform the devastated industrial town of Vinh into a model socialist city. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research in Vietnam and Germany with architects, engineers, construction workers, and tenants in Vinh’s mass housing complex, Schwenkel explores the material and affective dimensions of urban possibility and the quick fall of Vinh’s new built environment into unplanned obsolescence. She analyzes the tensions between aspirational infrastructure and postwar uncertainty to show how design models and practices that circulated between the socialist North and the decolonizing South underwent significant modification to accommodate alternative cultural logics and ideas about urban futurity. By documenting the building of Vietnam’s first planned city and its aftermath of decay and repurposing, Schwenkel argues that underlying the ambivalent and often unpredictable responses to modernist architectural forms were anxieties about modernity and the future of socialism itself.

The Cham people once inhabited and ruled over a large stretch of what is now the central Vietnamese coast. Written by specialists in history, archaeology, anthropology, art history, and linguistics, these essays reassess the ways that the Cham have been studied.

With over 220 striking photographs and insightful commentary, this Vietnamese design book captures the essence of Vietnamese style and art. Vietnam has long captured the imagination of travelers, both real and armchair. It is an appealing country, filled with natural beauty, tranquil village life and fascinating cities. Vietnam also has an inimitable architectural and interior design style, the product of its rich cultural heritage and the various influences of Chinese, French and other Western colonialism. Vietnam Style is an exploration of the balancing act between traditional vernacular design and architecture and the outside influences of colonialism. The unusual and striking new design styles created by melding these elements are a true cultural kaleidoscope of Vietnam today. Chinese-style shophouses, temples with Indian influences, Thai-style palaces, French Colonial civic and domestic buildings, and the variety of tribal and native wooden houses present in Vietnam Style offer an intimate look into the vibrant, yet virtually unknown world of modern Vietnamese architecture and design.

WINNER OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION'S JOHN K. FAIRBANK PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE CUNDHILL HISTORY PRIZE 2017 'This is the finest single-volume history of Vietnam in English. It challenges myths, and raises questions about the socialist republic's political future' Guardian 'Powerful and compelling. Vietnam will be of growing importance in the twenty-first-century world, particularly as China and the US rethink their roles in Asia. Christopher Goscha's book is a brilliant account of that country's history.' - Rana Mitter 'A vigorous, eye-opening account of a country of great importance to the world, past and future' - Kirkus Reviews Over the centuries the Vietnamese have beenboth colonizers themselves and the victims of colonization by others. Their country expanded, shrunk, split and sometimes disappeared, often under circumstances far beyond their control. Despite these often overwhelming pressures, Vietnam has survived as one of Asia's most striking and complex cultures. As more and more visitors come to this extraordinary country, there has been for some years a need for a major history - a book which allows the outsider to understand the many layers left by earlier emperors, rebels, priests and colonizers. Christopher Goscha's new work amply fills this role. Drawing on a lifetime of thinking about Indo-China, he has created a narrative which is consistently seen from 'inside' Vietnam but never loses sight of the connections to the 'outside'. As wave after wave of invaders - whether Chinese, French, Japanese or American - have been ultimately expelled, we see the terrible cost to the Vietnamese themselves. Vietnam's role in one of the Cold War's longest conflicts has meant that its past has been endlessly abused for propaganda purposes and it is perhaps only now that the events which created the modern state can be seen from a truly historical perspective. Christopher Goscha draws on the latest research and discoveries in Vietnamese, French and English. His book is a major achievement, describing both the grand narrative of Vietnam's story but also the byways, curiosities, differences, cultures and peoples that have done so much over the centuries to define the many versions of Vietnam.

Philippe M. F. Peycam completes the first ever English-language study of Vietnam's emerging political press and its resistance to colonialism. Published in the decade that preceded the Communist Party's founding, this journalistic phenomenon established a space for public, political contestation that fundamentally changed Vietnamese attitudes and the outlook of Southeast Asia. Peycam directly links Saigon's colonial urbanization to the creation of new modes of individual and collective political agency. To better justify their presence, French colonialists implemented a peculiar brand of republican imperialism to encourage the development of a highly controlled print capitalism. Yet the Vietnamese made clever use of this new form of political expression, subverting colonial discourse and putting French rulers on the defensive, while simultaneously stoking Vietnamese aspirations for autonomy. Peycam specifically considers the work of Western-educated Vietnamese journalists who, in their legal writings, called attention to the politics of French rule. Peycam rejects the notion that Communist and nationalist ideologies changed the minds of "alienated" Vietnamese during this period. Rather, he credits colonial urban modernity with shaping the Vietnamese activist-journalist and the role of the French, even at their most coercive, along with the modern public Vietnamese intellectual and his responsibility toward the group. Countering common research on anticolonial nationalism and its assumptions of ethno-cultural homogeneity, Peycam follows the merging of French republican and anarchist traditions with neo-Confucian Vietnamese behavior, giving rise to modern Vietnamese public activism, its autonomy, and its contradictory aspirations. Interweaving biography with archival newspaper and French police sources, he writes from within these journalists' changing political consciousness and their shifting perception of social roles.