When people think of tropical modernist architecture, they think of Brazil, India, or Ghana. Vietnamese modernist architecture rarely makes the list. Yet somewhere between the motorbikes and shop signs, Southern Vietnam hides a whole vocabulary of concrete brise-soleils, perforated screens, and geometric pergolas.
The case of Vietnamese modernist architecture
This strand of modernism does not belong to established, instantly recognisable names like Le Corbusier or Oscar Niemeyer. It belongs to ordinary people, to the modest shophouses that line every street in Southern Vietnam.
Vietnamese modernism: a history
After independence from French colonialism in 1954, Vietnam needed to rebuild. Its first generation of architects had been trained at Hanoi's École des Beaux-Arts de l'Indochine or abroad, where they were exposed to European modernist ideas, including the work of Le Corbusier. No longer working as colonial assistants, they chose modernism as a declaration: the colonial era was over, and so was its architecture.
Independence Palace by Ngô Viết Thụ
This was mostly a Southern phenomenon. After the Geneva Accords temporarily divided Vietnam in two, the capitalist South, backed by American funding, had what the North lacked: a market for architecture, clients, and the freedom to experiment.
Key examples and representatives
The South's clearest declaration was the Independence Palace in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City), built to replace the French-colonial governor's old residence after it was bombed in 1962. Several of the competing proposals were neoclassical, but President Ngô Đình Diệm made a symbolic decision: he chose the modernist one.
Independence Palace by Ngô Viết Thụ
The palace is renowned for its bamboo-shaped brise-soleil and was designed by Ngô Viết Thụ, the only Asian architect ever to win the Grand Prix de Rome. He left several other modernist landmarks across Saigon, each recognisable by its brise-soleil alone. At the University of Medicine and Pharmacy, perforated concrete climbs across multiple floors in near-psychedelic repetition. At the Southern Women's Museum, a geometric lattice scatters shadows on the wall behind. Ngô Viết Thụ was one of the key architects who developed modernism in Vietnam, alongside Lê Văn Lắm, Phạm Văn Thâng, Nguyễn Quang Nhạc, Nguyễn Văn Hoa and Tô Công Văn.
Southern Women's Museum by Ngô Viết Thụ
Vietnamese architects didn’t just copy international modernism, but translated it into the local climate. They developed an alphabet of tropical elements that temper light and air: concrete brise-soleils, ventilation blocks, pergolas and planters. Over time, this alphabet moved beyond architects and the institutions or wealthy clients who commissioned them. To ordinary people, these concrete façades were like nothing they had seen before: this is what the future could look like, and they wanted it for their homes.
University of Medicine and Pharmacy by Ngô Viết Thụ
The style spread simply: a motif spotted on a neighbour’s house, pointed out to the local craftsman, and a modernist trend taking hold street by street, neighbourhood by neighbourhood. This spontaneous embrace turned modernism into something rare: a vernacular, spoken by everyday shophouses.
What made this alphabet so adoptable was its modularity. Like Tetris blocks, the elements could be recombined endlessly, every owner composing their own façade.
The brise-soleil
A brise-soleil is often the first element you notice on a house, and the one that defines its whole character. More than just concrete, it's a game of shadows drifting slowly across the façade in rhythm with the sun, making light and dark, solid and void, part of the design itself. Its patterns range from simple vertical slats to lacy screens and abstract calligraphy.
The slats have an elegant side-effect: they accentuate the slenderness of the shophouse, built narrow and deep in the days when property taxes were based on façade width.
The pergola
The pergola is the crown of a shophouse, the final touch that lifts even the most ordinary building. Vietnamese homeowners often defied modernism's functional principles without knowing it.
Within this context, the pergola is where you see it most clearly: a series of fins with more air than concrete, until what was simply meant to shade the rooftop is elevated into abstract sculpture.
Ventilation blocks
Locally known as gạch hoa gió, literally 'windflower block,' these small perforated blocks let the breeze through while filtering light.
Their patterns are varied and sometimes come in orange ceramic: triangles, hearts, flowers, or symbols drawn from Vietnam's layered Buddhist, Confucian and folk traditions.
Planters
At its most basic, a planter is a concrete box cantilevered from the façade, with vegetation bringing shade, privacy and cooler air. But in homeowners’ hands they multiplied, varied in placement, colour and shape, with no rule to follow except that someone liked it there.
They turn otherwise flat façades into a set of shelves, cascading forward in layers of shadow. As architect Phạm Phú Vinh notes, this play with shade is a long-standing Vietnamese response to the tropical sun, already present in the large eaves and verandas of old wooden houses. Homeowners simply carried that habit into concrete. Modernism was therefore embraced not just as a break with the past, but as a subconscious continuation of it.
The Vietnamese modernist architecture alphabet
An alphabet only becomes a language when people start to write with it. Most Vietnamese build their own houses, working directly with local contractors instead of architects. The owner of a modernist homestay in Ninh Thuận said: 'My uncle was the one who came up with the design idea. At that time, everything was spontaneous and improvised, so there aren't any drawings left.'
No academic training, just a homeowner, a contractor, and an idea. The result is that finding the same façade twice is impossible. Each house has its own brise-soleil, its intuitive arrangement of elements carrying the imperfect charm of its owner's hand. Walking through Southern Vietnam, you start to read the streets like a language: each house speaks it, none of them with the same accent.
This is what makes Southern Vietnamese modernism unique. It did what modernism rarely achieved: it became vernacular, defined not by singular masterpieces but by popular embrace. Crafted by the people who live there, half-hidden behind a joyful clutter of altars, paint and shop signs, it has a warmth international modernism was so often accused of lacking.
The future of Vietnamese modernism
That same ordinariness is also what makes it vulnerable. Midcentury modernism is disappearing fast in Southern Vietnam, not seen as special but as outdated, replaced the moment an owner can afford something that signals higher status. Ironically, this often takes the form of faux-colonial plaster, with its fake Corinthian columns and golden balustrades. Yet there are signs of a nostalgic revival.
In Saigon, a trendy coffee shop called cà phê Linh opened in 2024, built from scratch in the midcentury style with ceramic gạch hoa gió and vertical slats: a fresh copy going up while the originals come down. It shows just how fast things move here, where something ignored for years becomes a fashionable coffee concept overnight. The question is open: commercial pastiche, or a step toward making modernism desirable again?