When people think of tropical modernism, Vietnam never comes to mind. Yet the South of the country hosts one of the world’s highest concentrations of modernist architecture — a heritage overlooked internationally because it exists mostly in ordinary houses. After independence from French colonialism in 1954, the style was embraced by ordinary people as a symbol of freedom, becoming a rare case of vernacular modernism.

But precisely because this heritage is ordinary, it is neither protected nor preserved. Pre-1975 buildings now represent only 15% of Vietnam’s built environment, while construction since 2000 dominates at 40%.

I decided to document this modernist architecture before it disappears. Below is a visual archive of 300 buildings documented through two field trips, spanning nine Mekong Delta cities: Ho Chi Minh City, Cần Thơ, Vĩnh Long, Long Xuyên, Châu Đốc, Tân Châu, Bến Tre, Sa Đéc, and Mỹ Tho. Some of these buildings may already be gone as you read this.

If you want to go deeper, the Vietnamese Modernist Architecture Facebook group (42,000 members) is an extraordinary community of daily building discoveries.

Photographed and researched by Alexandra van der Essen.
A documentary archive, not a curated photography portfolio.