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I’m sharing here my essay “Mundanist Architecture,” selected for the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 in Barcelona. It was chosen for “Becoming Attuned,” one of the congress’s six research lines, focused on the poetry and meaning of everyday, overlooked spatial practices. This is precisely what Mundanism explores: the idea that architecture’s deepest significance lies not in monuments, but in the ordinary homes that shape a place, with Southern Vietnamese modernism as its example. This is my own edited version, reflecting an earlier stage of fieldwork (120+ buildings; I’ve since documented over 300) and a few corrections from the UIA published version (DOI: 10.5821/ebook-9791388098666).

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Walk any street in Southern Vietnam and you’ll notice that most houses are modernist, likely one of the highest concentrations in the world. Yet this is largely overlooked, even by Vietnamese, since modernism there inhabits mostly ordinary homes. This essay explores how true architectural significance lies in everyday design passed daily without a glance, not in extraordinary monuments flattering humanity’s hubris.

Origins of Southern Vietnamese Modernism

Vietnam embraced modernism after 1954, a turning point marking both the end of the First Indochina War and the country’s independence from French colonial rule. Years of devastating conflict made rebuilding a priority (Phạm, 2021b).

Two reasons explain why modernism became the main reconstruction style. First, independence set the stage for Vietnam’s first generation of architects, from colonial assistants to independent practitioners (Pham & Truong, 2017). Most of them were trained at Hanoi’s École des Beaux-Arts de l’Indochine, where they absorbed European modernist ideas, including the work of Le Corbusier (Schenck, 2020). Second, modernism symbolized resistance against colonialism and Vietnam’s determination to become a modern nation. It expressed freedom and hope for a better future: a visual declaration of Vietnam’s break with its colonial past (Herbelin, 2016; Tipler, 2018; Truong, 2025).

Most modernist architecture favors monolithic forms, but Vietnamese architects, such as Ngô Viết Thụ, Lê Văn Lắm, or Nguyễn Quang Nhạc, thought differently. In response to the region’s warm, humid weather, they created a climate-attuned palette of brise-soleils, pergolas, and planters, designed in a distinctively light and open style. Together, they formed an architectural language, a tropical “alphabet”. Recombined in endless variations, this alphabet produced façades more complex, almost decorative, than the sober modernism seen elsewhere (Phạm, 2021a; Schenck, 2020).

Because there were not enough architects to meet reconstruction needs, ordinary people took charge. Seeing modernism as a symbol of progress, communities embraced this vocabulary and made it their own—so fully that it became a new vernacular: architecture of the people. Such popular grassroots adoption is globally unmatched (Schenck, 2020).

Mundanism: Architecture of the Everyday

This popular embrace is what makes Southern Vietnamese modernism moving: it has spirit, carrying the optimism of post-war middle-class life. I call this phenomenon “Mundanist Architecture“—a playful nod to “modernist”, that emphasizes its power as the architecture of everyday Vietnamese people.

This essay argues that the “Mundanism” of Southern Vietnamese modernism is what makes it significant. Modesty here is not mediocrity; it signals relevance and fit. Because the style was so attuned to context, culture, and climate, communities welcomed it for their daily living. Where ostentatious monuments proclaim human’s conquest over nature, these mundane homes testify to a softer harmony with it.

Mundanism defies current trends. We live in a culture dominated by entertainment, where architecture has become a speculative commodity driven by Instagrammable journalism and real estate pressure. Complex cultural narratives are flattened into marketable aesthetics for boutique hotels. Pallasmaa wrote in 1999: “Buildings are increasingly conceived and confronted through the eye rather than the entire body. … As the camera becomes the ultimate witness to and mediator of architecture, … we become voyeurs obsessed with visuality” (p. 23).

This is even truer today: TikTok shortens our attention spans and generative AI conditions our insatiable eyes to crave the extra-ordinary: starchitecture (Eberhardt, 2025).

Instead, this essay calls for architecture that grows organically, discovered scene by scene, rather than in an instant burst of visual gratification. Southern Vietnam offers a way to see this: not through the well-documented French colonial heritage, but through the overlooked modernist houses that stitch the subtle threads of its urban fabric.

Mundanism as cultural vehicle

Ordinary architecture is powerful because it honestly expresses local culture. Nowhere is this clearer than in Southern Vietnam, where houses were spontaneously built by residents.

When asked to picture something “authentically Vietnamese,” people rarely think of modernist houses; they jump to temples with upturned eaves. Yet authenticity often lies in what goes unnoticed: humble parts inventively combined by homeowners. It is the unique way in which Vietnam creatively adapted modernism that truly reveals its culture.

Vietnamese scholars describe Southern culture as flexible, open-minded, and expressive (Vu, 2025; Truong, 2025; Nguyen, 2025). Just a short ride through Ho Chi Minh City’s “chaotic-yet-somehow-it-works” traffic is enough to grasp this adaptability and characteristic “let it be” attitude. These traits can be traced back to history: Ho Chi Minh City and the Mekong Delta have long been trading centers, exposing Southerners to many outside influences. After the separation of Vietnam in 1954, waves of Northern migration to Ho Chi Minh City, which was considered a “safe zone” at the time, added yet another layer of diversity. Today, Vietnam officially recognizes 54 ethnic groups, including the Kinh, Khmer, Hoa, and Cham communities in the South (Nguyen, n.d.).

From this cultural melting pot came a habit of absorbing new, unconventional ideas and turning them into something uniquely local. If the mind is open, so is the architecture (Đỗ, 2025). Unlike the minimalist modernism typically seen elsewhere, Southern Vietnam stands out by blending function with decoration. There, modernism became expressive, experimental, and varied (Phạm, 2021a; Schenck, 2020).

Expressive — Modernist elements created by local architects began with a practical purpose: to protect from the tropical climate. But they quickly turned sculptural. Louvers intersect rhythmically with pergolas; colorful planters are suspended asymmetrically; concrete brackets lock the pieces in place. Each element serves a clear function but is elevated into an interplay of light and shadow, volume and void. With ‘windflower’ ventilation tiles (gạch hoa gió) and geometric engravings on top, each façade becomes an abstract artwork. Seen side by side, there’s a vibrant complexity to these houses that parallels the joyful intensity of the street below.

Experimental & Varied — No pattern repeats for long and no two houses are the same. Homeowners constantly remix shapes into personal creative compositions, assembling the modernist vocabulary as if selecting from an “à-la-carte” menu. A walk through the streets of the Mekong Delta is an endless series of geometric surprises, where each façade is marked by a playful yet intentional human imprint.

On its own, a brise-soleil can seem ordinary; together, they write a language unique to the Mekong Delta. Each house is different, but like dialects sharing a common grammar, they remain unmistakably Vietnamese. Architecture of the everyday—the public’s subconscious expression of taste—is therefore an underrated, profound lens for understanding local culture, more so than ostentatious monuments. It makes the point that culture reveals itself gradually, through the recurrence of small, honest details. It is in the intimate dialogue between communities and the honest forms they inhabit that lies the essence of what is “typically Vietnamese.”

 Mundanism as embodied sustainability

Ordinary architecture avoids grand gestures and reflects day-to-day practicality instead. Southern Vietnamese modernism emerged directly from the realities of climate and people: imagining a new post-colonial lifestyle and then shaping its envelope.

In Southern Vietnam’s tropical heat and humidity, climatic adaptation has always been a non-negotiable tradition: suspended roofs to block solar radiation, sunshades to filter light, perforated walls for airflow, loggias where families and neighbors socialize (Phạm, 2021a). Communities then subconsciously transferred this “knowledge from the streets” into modernist vocabulary: vernacular and modern merged, the impermanence of wood gave way to the durability of concrete, carrying forward habits across materials. Phạm Phú Vinh (2021a) observed, “What they were creating wasn’t necessarily modernist architecture, but vernacular architecture practiced with modernist ideas” (p. 192). Rather than being a total rupture with the past, as the modernist ideology called for, these houses were a continuation of it (Lara, 2008). The result is open but sheltered structures, reflecting the Vietnamese habit of blurring the boundaries between inside and outside (Phạm, 2021a). Built without formal blueprints, they embody the intuitive ecological intelligence of local craft.

“Ordinary” comes from the Latin ordinarius—literally “in the normal course of things,” or simply “as it should be.” That etymology is the argument: in a tropical climate, communities naturally embrace light, ventilated architecture. Ordinary is sustainable precisely because it aligns with what is fitting.

Still, the ordinary shifts as cities evolve. Many of these climate-responsive solutions are being replaced by sealed air-conditioned glass boxes: monuments to profit, not place. The appeal of air-conditioning is easy to understand, as urban densification creates heat islands and reduces opportunities for natural airflow. Passive techniques worked in their original context but can struggle in today’s packed urban fabric (Dang & Pitts, 2020; Nguyen et al., 2011). The idea is thus not to wholesomely replicate vernacular structures but to enhance them with light-touch upgrades. Sustainability, then, is best understood as a “negotiation” between vernacular knowledge and technological progress (Cruse, 2021). This negotiation has become urgent: Vietnam’s average temperature rose 0.26 °C per decade from 1971–2010, nearly twice the global rate, with the South warming fastest (Nguyen et al., 2013).

Mundanism, therefore, calls for empathic, anonymous architecture in harmony with its environment—modern yet deeply rooted in place and culture, part of a process rather than a world unto itself (Lefaivre & Tzonis, 2021), echoing the words of Modern Vietnamese architect Tạ Mỹ Duật: “We do not see modernity as chasing extraordinary things alien to real life. Architecture must serve society, oppose ostentation. True modernity is subtle simplicity reflecting its time” (Tạ, 1979, author’s translation).

Mundanism as resistance to uniformity

Ordinariness often carries pejorative labels: recurrent, habitual, common. Southern Vietnamese modernism instead shows how the ordinary itself paradoxically resists standardization. The so-called “International Style” had the ambition to spread a universal aesthetic across borders. But once a design language is absorbed into daily life, it stops being a bland global template and reacquires local character. Built and cherished by residents, it pushes back against globalization’s cultural homogenization, becoming unmistakably human.

This is especially clear in Southern Vietnam: because modernism reached a vernacular scale, the region offers a rare laboratory for watching uniform ideals fracture into inventive, poetic façades. Southerners re-appropriated modernism to reproduce the typical Southeast Asian shophouse, which represents the majority of properties in Ho Chi Minh City (Pitts et al., 2019). As the name indicates, shophouses have living space above, while the ground floor is used for retail, restaurants or cafés that directly open to the street. This sustains a dynamic culture of interaction where intimacy and neighborhood life blur, and each shophouse façade becomes an ‘active skin,’ permeable to street life (Lefaivre & Tzonis, 2021). Southern Vietnamese modernism thus resists sterility, not only because homeowners shaped it into personal artistic statements, but also because it remains inseparable from daily life, evident in traces accumulated on its façades: plants, oversized commercial signs, cluttered shops, small ancestor altars and personal touches.

The ordinary, in this way, turns extraordinary, revealing the traits that give each place its character. Shaped by urban rhythms, and shaping them in return, it crystallizes into a Vietnamese experience of space, seen in the play of shade and light across its modest façades. The International Style’s blankness, paradoxically, became the perfect canvas for homeowners’ creativity: a fresh start after foreign domination, and a medium for expressing their identity.

Brazil offers a parallel case, despite being on the opposite side of the world. There too, modernism spread bottom-up, as middle-class homeowners borrowed the architects’ vocabulary to build their own houses. There again, it was embraced in an optimistic spirit of creating a new, modern Brazil, far from its rustic past. Homeowners’ adaptations naturally responded to climate through concrete perforated screens. The stylistic outcome looks different—Brazil with butterfly roofs, thin metallic columns and azulejos (pastel ceramic tiles); Southern Vietnam with more intricate compositions of pergolas and brise-soleils—but the underlying process was the same: modernism becoming vernacular, creating a regional flavor unseen anywhere else (Lara, 2008; 2009).

A key nuance should be highlighted still: Brazilian modernism already enjoyed international recognition, climaxing with the construction of Brasília in 1957 under Costa and Niemeyer, whereas Southern Vietnam developed outside the spotlight. Nevertheless, the cases of Vietnam and Brazil show that when modernism fits with communities’ aspirations and local context, it can achieve popularity: an interesting contrast to its more contested reception elsewhere, and a direct counterpoint to certain critics such as postmodernists, who claimed modernism was inherently elitist and irreconcilable with mass adoption (Lara, 2008).

Ultimately, Mundanism shows how everyday architecture, shaped and re-appropriated by ordinary people, inevitably becomes unique—sometimes imperfect, but human and unexpected in ways sanitized perfection will never be. Phạm Phú Vinh (2021a) phrases it well “Vietnamese modernist architecture refines global modernism as it shows that people don’t want identical architecture for everyone, and that beauty, specialness, and freedom, are what people cherish” (p. 239).

Critical Mundanism

Is Southern Vietnamese modernism “picturesque” enough?

Mundanism presents a paradox. What makes it valuable are the very things that resist preservation: being overlooked, unassuming, and simply lived in. Its lack of Instagrammability and touristic cachet makes it even more fragile. Many Southern Vietnamese modernist houses are now seen as outdated. As income increases, residents aspire to build new homes: many continue with modernist approaches but in hermetic, energy-inefficient forms, others turn to neo-classical pastiche, also known as “New French Style”. Interestingly, those who choose this style do not associate it with colonial-style nostalgia, nor do they aim to copy European designs. For them, it simply signals social status and, more importantly, modernity (Herbelin, 2016).

Beyond taste, there are also practical pressures: most shophouses rise three to five stories, while regulation now allows up to seven. Shophouses in entangled narrow streets cannot accommodate the rising trend of car ownership (Seo & Kwon, 2017). People understandably seek larger spaces, brighter interiors, and contemporary comfort. No one can argue with that.

Those who recognize and want to preserve Southern Vietnamese vernacular modernism are usually a small circle:  scholars, architects, and a few enthusiasts. Yet might the impulse to preserve these buildings miss the point? Wouldn’t it risk fossilizing the past, and betraying Mundanism’s anti-elite spirit by imposing preservation from above? The debate remains open—and complex—given the unique phenomenon that Southern Vietnamese modernism represents in global architectural history and style.

Perhaps Mundanism is best understood as fluid, a “living organism,” precisely because it is human. It continually reshapes itself, absorbing cultural changes as they unfold (Podder, 2018). Southern Vietnamese modernism was born from Vietnamese eagerness for modern ideas, making it vulnerable to whatever represents modernity today. When these homes were built, they embodied status and modernity — a meaning now lost. In the words of Habermas, modernity is an ongoing process that “has to reassure itself continuously” (Lara, 2008, p. 66).

Perhaps Mundanism, also, is less a style than a process: the constant negotiation between people and the spaces they live in. The real lesson may be that architecture thrives when it is shaped by communities rather than consumed as a commodity. What might be needed instead is rehabilitation. There is an excellent recent example in Ho Chi Minh City, where a mid-century modernist villa has been converted into a Highlands Coffee, a Vietnamese coffee chain. Some of its original character has been lost in the process, but at least it remains part of the everyday: socializing over coffee is a central part of life in Vietnam. Most importantly, the building stays alive and relevant, not frozen behind museum glass: the essence of Mundanism itself.

Written and photographed by Alexandra van der Essen

Methodology

This research relied on two approaches:

• Photographic fieldwork: Three weeks of documentation across Hồ Chí Minh City and seven Mekong Delta cities (Cần Thơ, Vĩnh Long, Long Xuyên, Châu Đốc, Tân Châu, Bến Tre, and Sa Đéc), resulting in over 120 photographs of modernist houses. These cities were selected to represent major urban centers and smaller provincial capitals. The objective of this fieldwork was threefold. First, create visual archives of Southern Vietnamese modernism that is rapidly disappearing. Second, identify the stylistic specificities of modernist houses, by analyzing the recurrence of architectural elements. Third, confirm the experimental nature of this architecture, as no two houses are identical.

• Expert interviews: Scholars from the University of Architecture Hồ Chí Minh City (Vu Thi Hong Hanh), Van Lang University (Đỗ Phú Hưng), Hanoi University of Civil Engineering (Truong Ngoc Lan and Nguyen Manh Tri) and Mel Schenck (author and expert on Southern Vietnamese modernism) were interviewed to gather historical, social, and cultural insights. They were selected based on their expertise in architectural history, urban planning and sociology.

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References

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Dang, H. T., & Pitts, A. (2020). Urban morphology and outdoor microclimate around the “shophouse” dwellings in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Buildings, 10(3), 40. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings10030040

Đỗ, P. H., (Van Lang University). Interview by author. August 13, 2025.

Eberhardt, E. (2025, March 27). General public “less focused on starchitects” says AIA Gold Medal-winner Deborah Berke. Dezeen. https://www.dezeen.com/2025/03/27/aia-gold-medal-2025-deborah-berke-interview/

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Nguyen, M. T., (Hanoi University of Civil Engineering). Interview by author. August 12, 2025.

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Schenck, M. (2016). How Vietnam created its own brand of modernist architecture. Saigoneer. https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-architecture/8939-how-vietnam-created-its-own-brand-of-modernist-architecture

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Tipler, K. (2018). More than just an identity, Saigon’s modernist architecture reflects past optimism for a new era. Saigoneer. https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-architecture/14870-more-than-just-an-identity%2C-saigon-s-modernist-architecture-reflects-past-optimism-for-a-new-era

Truong, N. L. (Hanoi University of Civil Engineering). Interview by author. October 16, 2025.

Vu, T. H. H. (University of Architecture Ho Chi Minh City). Interview by author. August 1, 2025.