Institutional buildings

I. The Independence Palace

Architect: Ngô Viết Thụ
Address: 135 Nam Ky Khoi Nghia Street, Ho Chi Minh City

Few buildings in Vietnam carry as much symbolic weight as the Independence Palace. It was built in 1962 to replace the bombed neoclassical palace of the French colonial governor: several neoclassical proposals were submitted for its reconstruction, but all were rejected in favor of a modernist design by architect Ngô Viết Thụ. The message was clear: the colonial era is over, and Vietnam is ready to become a modern, independent nation.

A two-story concrete screen of bamboo-shaped forms spans the entire facade. The reference to Vietnamese culture is subtle but intentional, and inside the palace, it does what all great brise-soleils do: turn the play of light and shadows into abstract art.

II. The General Sciences Library

Architect: Bùi Quang Hanh & Nguyễn Hữu Thiện
Address: 69 Lý Tự Trọng Street, Ho Chi Minh City

Close to the Independence Palace, another imposing building: the General Sciences Library. As visitors walk through the entrance gate, they are immediately struck by the giant white geometric brise-soleil wrapping almost the entire façade. Repetitive geometric forms of precast concrete are gracefully woven together with stylized motifs drawn from Chinese calligraphy and dragons — a concrete curtain that produces constantly shifting patterns of light throughout the day. The architects weren’t lazy: at the back of the building, another brise-soleil with dragons and abstract calligraphy, but shaped and designed differently.

III. University of Medicine & Pharmacy

Architect: Ngô Viết Thụ
Address: 217 Đ. Hồng Bàng, Ho Chi Minh City

The University of Medicine & Pharmacy is another head-spinning building, almost entirely covered by a brise-soleil made of perforated precast concrete. The initial pattern is simple, but repeated with such intensity and variety of configurations that it creates an almost psychedelic, lacy artwork. The fact that it spreads across not only one but multiple façades of this monolithic building, and across different levels, only deepens the dystopian vertigo.

IV. VOH (People’s Radio building)

Architect: Lê Văn Lắm
Address: 3 Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Ho Chi Minh City

The Radio Broadcasting Station takes a similar approach: a simple perforated pattern of small circles tiled endlessly across the façade, enveloping the building like bubble wrap (apologies for the blasphemous comparison) to soften its monumental edges.

V. Southern Women’s Museum

Architect: Ngô Viết Thụ
Address: 202 Võ Thị Sáu, Ho Chi Minh City

One of the later works of Ngô Viết Thụ, this time for the Vietnamese Women’s Museum. The brise-soleil is made of a large net of interconnecting constellations, creating optical 3D cubic shapes that cast tiny shades of stars on the wall behind it. It sits directly behind a neoclassical building — an unlikely pair.

VI. V.A.R. building

Architect: Unknown
Address: 9 Nguyễn Công Trứ, Ho Chi Minh City

Deceptively simple from far away, this building is a masterpiece of delicate precision. Up close, one can only be amazed at the time, care and craftsmanship that has been invested in this complex arrangement of thin precast concrete bars, not only different in size, but different in orientation, and rounded at the corner of the street to top it all off. A tailor-made lacy dress draping the building’s body.

VII. Health Information & Education Centre

Architect: unknown
Address: 59B Nguyễn Thị Minh Khai, Ho Chi Minh City

There’s unfortunately not much information available on this building. As for other Vietnamese institutional designs, the brise-soleil plays with repetition: triangles stuck between patterns of intersecting lines, rotated across each row.

Private houses

Architects weren’t the only ones experimenting. Ordinary people embraced their modernist vocabulary as a symbol of post-colonial freedom, turning concrete into a vernacular building habit. Nowhere does modernism permeate daily life so vividly as in Southern Vietnam: homeowners played with geometric forms, bent them into sculptures, turning each façade into a personal creative statement.

I. Vertical slats

Vertical slats are the most common brise-soleil found on shophouses in Southern Vietnam. The design is simple (fine, concrete bars) but does something elegant: accentuate the slenderness of the already narrow Vietnamese shophouse. That slenderness has a history: property taxes were once based on façade width, a constraint homeowners cleverly dodged by building thin and deep, creating what are now called “tube houses”.

II. XL compositions

Less common but more arresting: some homeowners take the standard vertical slats and scale them up to unexpected, XL dimensions, giving the composition a monumental, almost brutalist feeling.

III. Expressive brise-soleils

Vietnamese modernism is usually abstract, but not always. Some homeowners couldn’t resist turning their houses into drawing canvas: flowers, fish, even scissor-like forms pressed into concrete — visual surprises that make you smile as you pass by and blur the boundaries of what modernism actually means.

IV. Regional varieties

Brise-soleils are an interesting medium to observe regional variations within Vietnamese modernism. In Quy Nhon, a coastal city in central Vietnam, a uniquely local pattern appears: thin, interconnected swirls of concrete, perhaps a visual abstraction of clouds. It points to something fascinating about how Vietnamese modernism spread: homeowners would spot a motif they liked on a neighbor’s house, point it out to their local craftsman, and an informal local trend would take hold, spreading street by street, neighborhood by neighborhood.

V. Unclassified

And then sometimes, as you walk past the infinite geometric rhythms of Vietnamese streets, you stumble upon something that defies categorization entirely: the pure creative impulse of a homeowner who simply went for it, playing with abstract forms to express the individuality of its maker.

That’s what makes Vietnamese modernism moving: it has spirit. Because it was embraced by ordinary people, it achieved a poetic quality rarely seen elsewhere.

Written and photographed by Alexandra van der Essen