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Tropical Comforts in Vietnam

Confort tropical au Vietnam
Andrew Cruse

Résumés

Des études récentes ont souligné combien la confrontation des styles architecturaux au Vietnam aux périodes coloniales et post-coloniales avait donné lieu à des formes hybrides qui ne respectent pas les dichotomies habituelles entre tradition et modernité, local et global, colonisé et colonisateur. Dans cet article, ce raisonnement est appliqué aux constructions tropicales du Vietnam utilisant la ventilation naturelle ou l'air conditionné. Ces bâtiments incarnent une forme hybride de confort tropical qui illustre les liens étroits entre naturel et artificiel, ouvert et fermé, technique et social. Le confort apparaît comme un processus de négociation entre le climat, le bâtiment, et ses occupants, dans un contexte socio-politique. On retrace brièvement l’utilisation historique des claustras et de l’air conditionné, avant d’examiner plus particulièrement deux bâtiments à Saïgon : le Palais de l’indépendance (Ngô Viết Thụ, 1966) et l’ambassade des États-Unis (Curtis and Davis, and Adrian Wilson and Associates, 1967). En conclusion, on observe comment la compréhension historique du confort tropical au Vietnam nous incite à nuancer une approche essentiellement politique de l’architecture récente du pays.

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1The office and apartment of Ho Chi Minh City-based architect Shunri Nishizawa are in the Binh Thanh House, in the city’s centrally located District 1. Designed by Nishizawa, Võ Trọng Nghĩa, and Daisuke Sanuki, the building’s street façade consists of stacked concrete screen walls interspersed with open spaces. The entire façade is nearly overgrown with tropical plants. (fig. 1)

Figure 1: Street elevation of the Binh Thanh House, Vo Trong Nghia Architects and Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2013.

Figure 1: Street elevation of the Binh Thanh House, Vo Trong Nghia Architects and Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2013.

Source: Photo by Andrew Cruse, 2020.

  • 1 “Binh Thanh House,” Architecture and Urbanism, no. 550, 2016, p. 148.
  • 2 I interviewed Nishizawa at the Binh Thanh House on 13 January 2020 while conducting fieldwork in H (...)
  • 3 In general terms, Vietnam is in the tropical zone between 8° and 23° north latitude. According to (...)

2These screen walls help to ventilate and shade interior spaces and have become a common feature of climate-attentive contemporary Vietnamese architecture. Yet shifting our view from the building’s elevation to its section, we see that these screen walls are only half of the story. They actually alternate with glass-enclosed, air-conditioned floors. (fig. 2) In describing the building, its architects explain the two interior environments this way: “the concept of the house is to accommodate two different lifestyles in a tropical climate; one is a natural and traditional lifestyle, utilizing natural lighting and ventilation […] and the other is a modern and well-tempered lifestyle with mechanical equipment such as air conditioners.”1 While this description suggests a clear division between two technologies and two “lifestyles,” a visit to the building demonstrates that the relationship between them is fluid and ambiguous.2 Screened areas can be sealed off and air conditioned ones opened up: natural tempering can be mixed with artificial cooling. Rather than a clear choice between two different interior climates, the house allows for a range of comforts in this humid tropical climate.3

Figure 2: Section of the Binh Thanh House, Vo Trong Nghia Architects and Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2013.

Figure 2: Section of the Binh Thanh House, Vo Trong Nghia Architects and Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2013.

Source: Vo Trong Nghia Architects, Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects.

  • 4 For Vietnam, see Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial: Repenser le métissage, Pari (...)
  • 5 In this paper, I will use the geographical names (Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Indochina, North Vietn (...)
  • 6 David Arnold, “‘Illusory Riches’: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950,” Singapore Jou (...)
  • 7 Gail Cooper, Air-conditioning America: Engineers and the controlled Environment, Baltimore, MD; Lo (...)

3Recent architectural scholarship focused on Vietnam, and Southeast Asia generally, has highlighted how colonial and postcolonial encounters are reflected in hybrid architectural styles that depart from fixed categories of traditional and modern, local and global, colonized and colonizer.4 In this paper, I extend this general argument to consider natural ventilation through screen walls and air conditioning in tropical Vietnam.5 As the architects’ description of Binh Thanh House demonstrates, these two environmental technologies are typically presented as binary opposites. Yet in the lived experience of the house, they mix in different ways, creating what can be called tropical comforts. The phrase tropical comforts presents a paradox to contemporary sensibilities accustomed to an air-conditioned world. Historically the tropics were seen as hot, impoverished, and pestilential regions, largely unsuitable for white settlement.6 Comfort, on the other hand, has been widely appropriated by the air-conditioning industry and associated with temperate climates considered conducive to efficiency and health.7 Such a fixed concept of comfort overlooks the productively destabilizing effects of tropical climate. Tropical comforts expose the entanglements between traditional and modern, natural, and artificial, the technical and the social. They reveal that comfort is a process of negotiation between climate, building, and occupant within a socio-political context.

4I will first briefly consider the history of screen walls and air conditioning in Vietnam. Architects in Vietnam incorporated screen walls into a variety of architectural styles and used them to ventilate interior spaces naturally—a role that the modernist preoccupation with sun shading often omits. Air conditioning and related comfort standards reveal a paradoxical thermal modernity in Vietnam that both integrated with and rejected the humid tropical climate. I will then specifically consider two significant buildings in Saigon, the Independence Palace (Ngô Viết Thụ, 1966) and the United States Embassy (Curtis and Davis, and Adrian Wilson and Associates, 1967), both of which have screen walls and air conditioning. Although these two buildings were constructed by allies in what the Vietnamese call the American War (the Republic of Vietnam and the United States) and completed within one year of one another, they produced quite different tropical comforts. The Independence Palace connected interior and exterior conditions. The U.S. Embassy, by contrast, separated the interior from the unstable geopolitical and geophysical conditions outside. That the same elements could produce such different conditions highlights the social construction of comfort. I will conclude with some observations about how such an historical understanding of tropical comfort in Vietnam informs a more nuanced and politically vital understanding of recent architecture in the country.

Screen Walls in Vietnam

  • 8 Hannah le Roux, “Building on the boundary—modern architecture in the tropics,” Social Identities, (...)
  • 9 Edward Durell Stone, The Evolution of an Architect, New York, NY: Horizon Press, 1962, p. 137-165.
  • 10 For the Villa Baizeau, see Tim Benton, “La Villa Baizeau et le brise-soleil,” in Varoujan Arzouman (...)

5One commonly finds architectural screen walls in mid-century tropical architecture and climatic modernist building. Their architects often looked to vernacular sources as inspiration for their climate-sensitive, contemporary designs. To cite two well-known examples, Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew’s University College in Ibadan, Nigeria (1957) featured extensive use of screen walls that tempered the liminal spaces around dormitories and classroom buildings. Hannah le Roux has described these screens as the spatial and formal “absorption of the indigenous [...] into a western aesthetic.”8 Edward Durrell Stone’s screen-wrapped American Embassy in New Delhi (1958) projected an image of cultural leadership through climate sensitivity inspired by Indian vernacular architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile blocks (which had, in turn, been inspired by Mesoamerican architecture).9 Within the modern western canon, this climate-conscious approach is commonly traced to Le Corbusier, and the role of tropical climates in the development his brise-soleil, from the earliest example at the Villa Baizeau (Tunis, 1928) to the geometric virtuosity of the Tour d’ombres (Chandigarh, 1950-1965).10

  • 11 This was commonly explained in manuals for tropical building such as Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tr (...)
  • 12 Aladar Olgyay and Victor Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Unive (...)

6Such screen walls are often associated with their role in controlling unwanted solar heat gain by shading a building’s weather façade behind the screen.11 There is often a loose fit between the screen’s sun shading role and the climates in which one finds them. These range from both dry and humid tropical climates to more temperate zones where designers could seasonally tune the screens to separate undesirable high-angle summer sun from desirable low-angle winter sun.12

  • 13 Ba Dang Nguyen, Vu Phuong Nguyen and Hoang Van Ta, Traditional Vietnamese Architecture, Hanoi: Thế (...)
  • 14 I thank Ylan Vo for her help with these Vietnamese terms.
  • 15 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 263-276.
  • 16 For example, see Anh-Tuan Nguyen, Quoc-Bao Tran, Duc-Quang Tran and Sigrid Reiter, “An investigati (...)

7The modernist focus on the screen wall’s role in sun shading and their loose fit to climate can obscure the important role that such walls have in allowing for natural ventilation in Vietnam’s tropic climate. In hot, humid climates, the promotion of air movement is an important cooling technique that takes advantage of conductive and evaporative heat transfer. Much rural Vietnamese vernacular architecture was built with non-load bearing walls under timber roofs supported on columns.13 Generally, the roofs controlled solar insolation while the walls allowed for natural ventilation with some degree of visual privacy. Craftspeople commonly made these walls from woven panels, such as the traditional nhà tranh, or thatched house. The woven panels were made from locally available materials including bamboo (tre), palm leaves (lá dừa), sedge (cói), and jute (sợi đay).14 In a striking counterexample of typical technological narratives, French colonial architects and engineers borrowed some of these non-industrial materials and techniques, adapting them to their own work.15 The architects of today are regularly re-examining such techniques as part of a discourse on sustainability.16

  • 17 Miles Lewis, “breeze blocks” in Australian Building: A Cultural Investigation. URL: www.mileslewis (...)

8In English-language histories of Vietnamese architecture, the nomenclature used to describe screen walls is commonly associated with an architectural modernism that favours their role in sun shading, rather than ventilation. English-language descriptions often refer to them as brise-soleil, shade blocks, or pattern blocks, using terms that connote the traditions of tropical architecture and climatic modernism. One also sees the terms claustra and breeze blocks. Claustra, being an older French term for a light, perforated screen, does not carry any modernist connotation. While the term “breeze block” might suggest that the masonry unit played a role in natural ventilation, “breeze” in fact describes a fine cinder derived from burning coke and used as a lightweight aggregate.17

  • 18 I thank Ylan Vo and Shunri Nishizawa for their help with Vietnamese terms, and Qiannan Wang for he (...)

9In Vietnamese, the compound nouns used to describe these screen walls emphasize their role in natural ventilation rather than sun shading. Vietnamese speakers commonly referred to them by the terms: gạch thông gió, gạch hoa thông gió, gạch hoa gió, and gạch bông gió. These terms are made from different combinations of the words: gạch (brick or masonry), thông gió or bông gió (ventilation or passing wind), and hoa (flower). The term hoa (flower) may be a reference to the Chinese term “flower window” (花窗), used to describe glazed, perforated tiles that are cast in decorative patterns and common in traditional Chinese architecture. One also sees the composite loanword tường claustra (claustra wall), although its use is uncommon.18

  • 19 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 241-263.
  • 20 Li Yanjuan, “The Spread and Influence of the Pottery Making Techniques from Guangdong Skiwan Kiln (...)
  • 21 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 251-260.
  • 22 For a popular history and extensive catalogue of different screen block shapes and manufacturing p (...)

10Screen wall elements in Vietnam exist in many materials, shapes, and sizes and are associated with traditional as well as modern construction practices. These include perishable natural materials like wood, bamboo, and palm, as well as industrially produced concrete and masonry, including brick, terra cotta, glazed ceramic brick, and terrazzo. Clay and terra cotta bricks were common regional building materials throughout Vietnam.19 Masons could lay brick and concrete block screen walls with solid units in an open bond pattern. Flower windows were commonly made of glazed ceramic and were often produced by Chinese immigrants to Indochina.20 Flower windows were commonly used in openings in otherwise solid masonry walls. The French introduced concrete and terrazzo to Vietnam in the early twentieth century21 and they are still commonly used materials for screen wall masonry blocks. Concrete could be precast in open shapes, using techniques similar to those used to cast typical concrete blocks.22 For projects with larger budgets, craftspeople cast custom shapes in concrete or terrazzo that were often much larger than standard masonry units.

  • 23 See the recent popular history Mel Schenck, Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-Centur (...)

11Historians and critics have identified screen walls as a common feature of Vietnamese architecture from mid-century to the present, especially in South Vietnam, and emphasized their role in sun shading.23 In doing so, they risk neglecting the role these screens played in natural ventilation. There is not a clear distinction between sun shading screens and ventilation screens. In fact, the flat roofs of many modern buildings meant that the façade performed both roles. An indication that a screen wall played a significant role in natural ventilation is its integration into the building’s spatial organization. Spatially, architects used screens for ventilation in three principal ways: to ventilate an individual room, to ventilation liminal spaces often used for circulation or as verandas, and as part of a larger free plan or free section strategy that extended deep into the building. Architects, both Vietnamese and foreign, used screen walls as part of building ventilation strategies throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods. The role of such screens grew from discrete façade elements in regionally inspired and moderne buildings, to become the major façade elements. Some architects were explicit about references to vernacular traditions, while others referenced historical elements within a more syncretic modern language. Still others were silent on the subject.

  • 24 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 61-110. As Herbelin no (...)
  • 25 Ibid., p. 78.

12Caroline Herbelin has described how the French urbanist and architect Ernest Hébrard consciously used vernacular strategies, including screens, as part of what he called the style indochinois.24 Although Hébrard was only in the colony for five years, his modern regionalist approach influenced subsequent French colonial and Vietnamese architects. As Herbelin describes, Hébrard used the syntax, rather than the vocabulary, of Vietnamese vernacular architecture, especially as it pertained to form and technical solutions to alleviate high heat and humidity.25 This meant using the roof to control sun and screens to allow for natural ventilation. The Musée Blanchard de la Brosse (Saigon, 1929, today the Museum of Vietnamese History), designed by Auguste Delaval in the style indochinois, demonstrates such an approach. The building’s tiled double-roof shades its occupied spaces, while high and low flower windows ventilate the tall perimeter galleries through stack ventilation. Larger panels of flower windows on the centrally located pergola work similarly to ventilate the rotunda.

  • 26 Ibid., p. 98-99. Herbelin explains how Kruze, like Hébrard, was inspired by the regionalist work i (...)
  • 27 Ibid., p. 119-120. French hygiene manuals for residential buildings in the colony also emphasized (...)

13One finds a similar ventilation strategy in residential buildings by two of the earliest Vietnamese architects in private practice, Nguyễn Cao Luyện and Hoàng Như Tiếp, both graduates of the Ecole des beaux-arts de l’Indochine (ebai). The school’s pedagogy was strongly influence by Hébrard’s regionalist approach through the teaching of Arthur Kruze.26 Herbelin describes how, in the mid-1930s, Luyện and Tiếp wrote a series of articles about climatic adaptation, including discussions of natural ventilation and screening.27 Their portfolio includes a number of moderne villas for wealthy Vietnamese clients. These houses had flat roofs, with awnings over individual windows for sun control. Like flower windows, here discreet ventilation grilles regularly spaced below the cantilevered roof parapet vented warm air at the ceiling level from individual rooms.

14French architects practicing in Vietnam incorporated screen walls into civic and commercial Art Deco buildings to cool and shade transition spaces such as stairs and entries. Such screens created a tempered zone in the transition areas between interior and exterior spaces. The State Bank of Vietnam in Hanoi (Félix Dumail, 1926 and Georges André Trouvé, 1930) has a semi-circular entry pavilion that incorporated large Cham-inspired decorative screen panels. The bâtiment de la Marine nationale in Saigon (Paul Veysseyre, 1939) uses large screen made of precast concrete units to wrap two exterior stair towers.

  • 28 Herbelin reports that Nguyễn Cao Luyện and Hoàng Như Tiếp saw the veranda as a colonial legacy. Ca (...)

15By mid-century, the size of some screens had grown to cover large areas of the main façade. The spaces behind them often functioned as a liminal zones like verandas, a feature with roots both in both vernacular and colonial traditions in Vietnam and elsewhere.28 Having an open space immediately behind a large screen wall was also important to protect interior spaces during the monsoon season when wind-driven rain would be blown through the screen. One can see such an approach at the General Science Library in Saigon, (Bùi Quang Hanh and Nguyễn Hữu Thiện, 1971). (fig. 3) The architects covered one elevation of the building’s simple massing—a thick, flat concrete roof supported by slender beams and columns—with a large-scale screen. The screen is a reinterpretation of the traditional flower window as a monumental concrete one that covers nearly the entire main facade. The screen protects a walkway space outside of the library’s two-story main reading room. The weather façade on the interior side of this walkway has operable windows, allowing the main reading room to indirectly open to the exterior.

Figure 3: General Science Library, Bùi Quang Hanh and Nguyễn Hữu Thiện, Ho Chi Minh City, 1971.

Figure 3: General Science Library, Bùi Quang Hanh and Nguyễn Hữu Thiện, Ho Chi Minh City, 1971.

Source: Photo by Alexandre Garel, 2017.

  • 29 William S. Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000, p (...)
  • 30 For Soviet guidelines, see Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West A (...)

16Although there were fewer resources for new construction in North Vietnam than in South Vietnam, Vietnamese and foreign architects designed significant modernist buildings in the north that incorporated screen walls. Many buildings on the Hanoi University of Science and Technology campus (1965) make extensive use of exterior shading for stairs and walkways outside of classrooms and faculty offices. Shortly after it opened, a Western journalist described the campus as “the only important new building” in Hanoi.29 The buildings’ screens ranged from open bond patterns laid with solid bricks to hollow precast concrete screen blocks. Soviet architects from Giprovuz (the State Design Institute for Higher Educational Institutions) designed the campus and its buildings on the grounds of an earlier French-designed cité universitaire for the University of Hanoi. At the time of its design and construction, the Soviets were developing technical guidelines for other projects in tropical Africa, including climate information and sun shading options. It is not clear if such guidelines existed for this project in Southeast Asia and whether those that they did have addressed natural ventilation.30

  • 31 Lê recounts the process of building the Children’s Palace in the context of North Vietnam in Le Va (...)

17East German-educated architect Lê Văn Lắm completed the Hanoi Children’s Palace (1976) the same year as his Hồ Chí Minh City People’s Radio Building (1976) in Saigon. Lắm used large screen walls to define the main façade of both buildings. While the Children’s Palace was technically simpler than the Radio Building—with precast concrete screen units supported directly on slab edges—its spatial integration of the screen is quite sophisticated. 31 The Children’s Palace screen wall worked as part of three different spatial conditions on different floors. The screen tempered exterior walkways and stairs on lower levels. It allowed for cross ventilation of floor-through rooms on intermediate levels. And it was used to individually vent small rooms lining double loaded corridors on the upper levels.

18This cursory unpacking of screen walls in Vietnam clarifies that the architects of the Binh Thanh House saw its screen as accommodating a “traditional lifestyle” because it naturally ventilated an open interior, providing cooling without air conditioning. This legacy is clear in the Vietnamese terms used to describe the units used to construct such walls. Yet their meaning is not as stable as this single term suggests. Architects in Vietnam have used increasingly large screen walls in increasingly visible roles, from individual opening, to large panels, to dominant façade elements. In parallel to these exterior changes, architects integrated screened façades with new interior organizations, ranging from individual rooms, to veranda and circulation spaces, to free plans and sections. The appearance of air conditioning in Vietnam further expanded the possibilities for creating tropical comfort in screened and non-screened buildings.

Air Conditioning and Comfort in Vietnam

  • 32 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Tim Winter, “Thermal Modernity and Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture, (...)

19In their study of Singapore’s “thermal modernity,” Jiat-Hwee Chang and Tim Winter argue that the uptake of air conditioning in postcolonial contexts, rather than being a universalizing process, reflected the specifics of each new nation through the transformation of built space and the reconfiguration of indoor and outdoor relationships.32 In the case of South and North Vietnam, air conditioning was first installed in hotels and hospitals in the context of the American War. But its use in these two types of buildings was quite different. Americans and other Westerners air-conditioned hotels, and diplomatic and military buildings, primarily for foreigners. At the same time, Vietnamese architects and engineers adapted hospital air conditioning to the countries’ economic and energetic contexts, using it to improve the health of Vietnamese patients. In parallel with the use of air conditioning, Vietnamese architects and building scientists began research programs into thermal comfort. Unlike American and European comfort researchers that focused largely on ideal standards for air-conditioned commercial buildings, Vietnamese comfort researchers looked to create comfortable housing environments in relationship to a variable exterior climate.

  • 33 At mid-century, very few hotels existed in Hanoi. The best-known new hotel was the Thắng Lợi Hotel (...)
  • 34 Several of his buildings had innovative screen walls, including the Banque nationale pour le comme (...)
  • 35 Tim Doling, Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn: Vanishing heritage of Hồ Chí Minh City, Hanoi: Thế Giới Publ (...)
  • 36 Personal communication with Mel Schenck, 8 January 2021.

20International hotels were some of the earliest air-conditioned spaces in tropical South Vietnam.33 Perhaps the best-known example was Saigon’s Caravelle Hotel (1959). Built for a French conglomerate (including Air France, for whose new jet it was named), the ten-story building was designed by Nguyễn Văn Hoa, working then as part of the Hoa-Thâng-Nhạc partnership. Nguyễn, who studied at the EBAI and later worked with Arthur Kruze, was responsible for several major modernist buildings in South Vietnam.34 The Hotel had small exterior sun shades suspended from upper floor balconies, and an American-made Trane air conditioning system cooled the interior. Hotel guests at the Caravelle were largely foreigners: it housed the Saigon bureaus of many American print and television news services as well as American military advisors and the Australian and New Zealand Embassies. Saigon historian Tim Doling describes that, during the 1960s, many foreign journalists moved to the Caravelle because it was air conditioned.35 The nearby Rex Hotel, site of the U.S. military command daily press conference (known derisively as the “five o’clock follies”), was at least partially air conditioned.36

  • 37 Tim Doling, Exploring Saigon- Chợ Lớn, op. cit. (note 35), p. 242.
  • 38 Personal communication with Mel Schenck 8 January 2021.
  • 39 Mel Schenck, “The Largest Military Construction Project in History,” The New York Times, 16 Januar (...)

21Americans installed air conditioning in many diplomatic and military buildings. The headquarters of the United States Information Services (USIS) at 39 Lý Tự Trọng street (Arthur Kruze with Nguyễn Văn Hoa, early 1950s) was “completely air conditioned,”37 while the first U.S. Embassy in Saigon had portable air conditioning units installed in many of its windows. Architect Mel Schenck, who managed construction for the U.S. Navy in Saigon in the early 1970s, remembers many of the quarters for enlisted soldiers and officers were air conditioned with electrical power provided by generators.38 Much of the military construction in Vietnam was done by a private American consortium known as RMK-BRJ. This included large base camps, some with air-conditioned shopping malls and movie theatres.39

  • 40 John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibility and Design in Early Modern Britain and Earl (...)

22The comfort provided in these hotels and diplomatic and military installations can be described as physical comfort, a unique Anglo-American construct John Crowley defines as “the self-conscious satisfaction with the relationship between one’s body and its immediate physical environment.”40 These spaces were exclusive and, in many cases, highly controlled, not intended for local Vietnamese populations but for foreigners in the country.

  • 41 Julie Willis, Philip Goad and Cameron Logan, Architecture and the Modern Hospital: Nosokomeion to (...)

23South Vietnamese hospitals, like international hotels, also featured air conditioning, although it was used differently in Vietnam than in many Western hospitals. Air conditioning first appeared in the operating rooms of American and European hospitals in the 1930s. It was installed to supply the fresh, filtered air prescribed by the prevailing germ theory of disease. Air conditioning also allowed medical staff to control the room’s temperature and humidity for the well-being of anesthetized patients who could not properly thermoregulate. By the 1950s, air conditioning had spread to other hospital spaces including administration, diagnostic, and outpatient departments. The United States led this trend.41

  • 42 A partial list includes the hospital in Gia Định (1966), Thống Nhất (1972), Huế (1972), and the Bì (...)
  • 43 Nguyễn Hữu Thai “Trần Đình Quyền: “Hospital architecture needs to be airy and functional,” 6 May 2 (...)
  • 44 Podium and slab buildings had high-rise slabs for inpatient wards over a ground level building wit (...)
  • 45 In traditional Sino-Vietnamese cosmogony, health is a balance between the oppositional forces of â (...)
  • 46 A possible precedent for the Thống Nhất Hospital was the Fort Hamilton Veterans’ Administration Ho (...)

24From the mid-1960s to 1975, Trần Đình Quyền was employed by the South Vietnamese Ministry of Health, where he was responsible for the design of several large hospitals that included some air conditioning.42 Quyền had begun his studies in medicine before completing an architecture degree in Saigon in 1960. Given his medical background, he was later selected for a 6-month study tour of American hospitals sponsored by the Ministry and UNICEF. Following this trip (during which he was briefly a hospital patient with a broken leg), Quyền received a scholarship to study architecture at Columbia University in New York.43 There he was exposed to new ideas in hospital organization, including the “podium and slab” and “racetrack” models. They focused on efficient circulation for doctors and nurses to improve patient treatment and relied on air conditioning to maintain a clean and stable interior climate.44 Generally, these were mid-rise, deep-plan buildings that mirrored contemporary developments in office buildings. On his return to South Vietnam in 1964, Quyền sought to adapt these efficient, modern hospital models to South Vietnam. In large part this meant a judicious use of air conditioning. His limited use of air conditioning may have also been affected by traditional Vietnamese beliefs that too much cold air could be unhealthy.45 Quyền describes how, instead of using large, compact volumes with sealed façades that relied on artificial conditioning, he organized his projects based on naturally ventilated blocks with air conditioning limited to critical areas. The best know example of this work is the Thống Nhất Hospital in Saigon (1972).46 There Quyền wrapped a mid-rise central volume with lower blocks that extended to the edges of the site. Both the central volume and the edge blocks were organized around courtyards. A screen wall covered the hospital’s principal façade. As in other examples, this screen shaded and ventilated exterior building circulation.

  • 47 Chiêu Danh Bùi, “Where Uncle Ho rested during the war years,” 27 October 2011 [in Vietnamese]. URL (...)
  • 48 Tuan Pham, “The process of building Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, Special work with political and cultura (...)
  • 49 Chiêu Danh Bùi, “Where Uncle Ho rested during the war years,” op. cit. (note 47).
  • 50 William S. Logan, Hanoi, op. cit. (note 29), p. 192-196.
  • 51 Chiêu Danh Bùi, “Where Uncle Ho rested during the war years,” op. cit. (note 47).

25Hồ Chí Minh’s mausoleum in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh Square (1975) was likely the largest air conditioning installation in North Vietnam at this time and was directly related to hospital design. Following Hồ’s death in September 1969, military personnel stored his body in the air-conditioned operating theatre of Hanoi’s central military hospital.47 There the team maintained a constant 16° C, 75% relative humidity based on the recommendations of the Lenin Lab, a Moscow medical center dedicated to embalming and maintaining corpses.48 Hồ’s final wishes were to be cremated and to have his ashes scattered around the country. However in November 1969, the North Vietnamese Politburo voted instead for the long-term preservation of his body in a mausoleum that would protect it against the “harmful fluctuations of climate” and to keep it safe against “war and enemy sabotage.”49 A joint Soviet-Vietnamese team of EBAI graduate Nguyễn Ngọc Chân and Garold Grigorievich Isakovich of the Soviet Civil Design Institute led the mausoleum design team.50 The building was not completed until 1975, due to the labour and material shortages caused by the ongoing war. The Mausoleum included the relatively recent technology of an air curtain at the main entry. It had two internal zones, one which conditioned general interior spaces and a second system for the “special lung” of the corpse room where a separate air conditioning system maintained the environmental conditions recommended by the Lenin Lab. The building’s mechanical engineer saw the system, which was built from Japanese components, as the beginning of the country’s cooling industry.51

26The use of air conditioning in hotels and hospitals was intended for two different populations and had two distinct aims. Hotels, and related military and diplomatic buildings, were largely designed by and for Westerners in South Vietnam, many of whom were there on war-related efforts. Engineers specified air-conditioned indoor climates in these spaces to create physical comfort for their occupants. In the case of hospitals, the judicious use of air conditioning was to improve health outcomes for local populations based on modern medical theory that may have been at odds with traditional practices. As the work of Trần Đình Quyền shows, its use was informed by practices in the west while being adjusted to the Vietnamese climatic, economic, and energetic contexts. These approaches highlight how different attitudes towards comfort, health, and interior climate in North and South Vietnam affected the initial uses of air conditioning in both countries.

  • 52 Gail Cooper, Air-conditioning America, op. cit. (note 7), p. 51-79.
  • 53 David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Oxford; Cambridg (...)
  • 54 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Daniel J. Ryan, “Editorial: Historicizing Entanglements of Architecture and Co (...)
  • 55 P.O. Fanger, Thermal Comfort, Copenhagen: Danish Technical Press, 1970.
  • 56 ISO 7730, Ergonomics of the Thermal Environment, Geneva: ISO, 1994. And Thermal Environmental Cond (...)
  • 57 For Japan see Shin-ichi Tanabe and Ken-ichi Kimura, “Thermal comfort requirements under hot and hu (...)

27Interior thermal comfort standards helped to drive the widespread adoption of air conditioning in temperate as well as tropical regions. This research had begun in the United States in the 1920s and the following decade in Britain.52 Much of this work shared an environmentally deterministic basis that linked climate patterns to cultural development. With roots stretching back to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century tropical medicine and other colonial enterprises, this view presented temperate regions as more conducive to economic, cultural, and material success than tropical ones.53 Recent scholarly attention has shown how consideration of comfort in the colonial settings continued such deterministic thinking while helping to further metropolitan interests in the tropics.54 By the early 1970s, air conditioning-related comfort research began to coalesce around a one-size-fits-all approach called the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) that supported a thermally uniform interior climate. Developed through laboratory-based research in temperate regions, the PMV held that all people, regardless of race, gender, age, or prevailing climate conditions, preferred the same interior climate.55 Its focus was largely on sedentary office workers, although it was often more broadly applied to people in commercial and residential buildings. The International Standards Organization (ISO) and the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) eventually wrote this research into normative comfort standards that were adopted by different national and local governments.56 By the 1980s, comfort researchers were establishing comfort laboratories in Japan and Singapore, in part to more closely examine how the PMV standard applied to tropical regions and residents.57 These laboratories extended basic protocols and values that had been developed in temperate research centers (most notably the ASHRAE laboratory in Kansas and Fanger’s laboratory in Denmark) to tropical regions.

  • 58 For an account of early field studies by some later proponents of this methodology, see Michael A. (...)
  • 59 Michael A. Humphreys, “Field studies of thermal comfort compared and applied,” Building Research E (...)
  • 60 Richard De Dear and Andris Auliciems, “Thermal Neutrality and Acceptability in Six Australian Fiel (...)
  • 61 Richard De Dear and Gail Brager, Developing an Adaptive Model of Thermal Comfort and Preference: F (...)
  • 62 ashrae, Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy, Atlanta, GA: ASHRAE, 2004 (ASHRAE St (...)
  • 63 Thomas Parkinson, Richard De Dear and Gail Brager, “Nudging the adaptive thermal comfort model,” E (...)

28In parallel to laboratory studies, comfort researchers also conducted field studies to determine what conditions occupants found comfortable in real-world settings. Since the 1930s, researchers had used such studies to quantify comfort of workers, soldiers, and residential inhabitants in temperate and tropical climates.58 Field studies involved researchers surveying building occupants about their comfort while recording interior and exterior climate conditions. They then statistically analyzed this data to identify correlations between comfort and climate. Field study research was generally less organized than laboratory work but in the mid-1970s, Michael Humphreys, a researcher at the British Building Research Establishment (bre), published a report comparing several field studies.59 In it, he identified a connection between exterior climate and indoor comfort preference, what later researchers called a “climate signal.”60 Over the following decade, field study-based research demonstrated that occupants of naturally ventilated buildings preferred a wider range of comfort conditions than occupants of air conditioned buildings did, based on physiological and psychologically adaptive processes. This approach became known as the adaptive thermal comfort model.61 By 2004, ASHRAE incorporated a somewhat reductive version of the adaptive thermal comfort model into its thermal comfort standard along with the air conditioning-focused PMV approach.62 The growing number of field study researchers and projects, especially in Asia, subsequently identified that tropical residents of some areas preferred warmer temperatures than residents of temperate regions.63

  • 64 Thanh Son Le, “Ecological architecture as a forgotten opportunity in Vietnam,” MATEC Web of Confer (...)
  • 65 N.H. Dung, “Discussions of Human Thermal Comfort in Vietnam,” in Fergus Nicol, Michael A. Humphrey (...)
  • 66 American John Busch studied the impact of office comfort standards on the Thai energy standards wh (...)
  • 67 Personal communication with Williamson, June 2021.
  • 68 D.N. Pham, Bioclimatic architecture, Hanoi: Construction Publishing House, 2002. Discussed in Anh (...)
  • 69 The Vietnamese code TCVN 7438: 2004 Thermal Environment. This standard is based on the internation (...)

29North Vietnamese government agencies and institutions supported limited comfort research, focused largely on housing. The Bureau of Civil Design, known today as the Vietnamese National Construction Consultants, conducted this initial work. Originally established in 1955 in North Vietnam, the Bureau’s primary concern was development of construction materials and methods for housing within the context of wartime constraints. By the mid-1960s, several researchers were investigating connections between housing, climate, and comfort.64 Beginning in 1981, researchers affiliated with the Hanoi Architectural University began to make systematic studies of thermal comfort related to the development of public housing. These researchers sought to integrate their work with the international body of field study research. Professor Huu Dung Nguyen, from the Research Centre for Architectural Indoor Climatology and Environment at Hanoi Architectural University, presented his group’s work at the First Windsor Conference in 1994, the first international symposium focused on adaptive thermal comfort.65 Dung’s presentation emphasized that a main goal of his group’s research was energy conservation by avoiding an over-reliance on air conditioning. This work paralleled other research in less economically developed tropical countries in Southeast Asia including Thailand and Malaysia.66 Dung subsequently developed a brief research collaboration with Terry Williamson at the University of Adelaide investigating housing comfort in Hanoi.67 Work by others in the early 2000s sought to develop a bioclimatic chart for Vietnam. Drawing on earlier publications by Victor and Aladar Olgyay, and Brauch Givoni, this chart allowed architects to tailor design strategies to the different climate regions of Vietnam.68 Collectively, this work demonstrates an engagement with global efforts to connect climate, comfort, and energy, efforts that were timely with adaptive thermal comfort while curiously delayed with the bioclimatic chart. Despite a clear research interest in Vietnam to link comfort, climate, and energy conservation, the country officially adopted the PMV-based ISO comfort standard in 2004.69

30Vietnam’s thermal modernity reflects paradoxical attitudes towards air conditioning and its related comfort standard, the PMV. While the Binh Thanh House architects associated “mechanical equipment such as air conditioners” with a “modern” lifestyle, in fact the initial use of air conditioning in Vietnam was for foreigners during wartime. Parallel to this, the nearly concurrent use by air conditioning in Vietnamese hospitals seems to anticipate the basis for adaptive thermal comfort model by providing comfort while minimizing the reliance on air conditioning and associated energy costs. Like the consideration of screen walls and a “traditional” lifestyle, “modern” lifestyle does not capture the range of ways architects and engineers historically used air conditioning in Vietnam. Instead, its use was dependent of specific actors and the socio-political context in which they were using it.

31These general discussions of screen walls and air conditioning in Vietnam provide some context for how architects and engineers used each of these environmental technologies and the types of comforts that they provided. Shifting now to consider the specific cases of the Independence Palace and the United States Embassy in Saigon gives a detailed perspective on the significant role of the socio-political context in shaping comfort. These buildings make an interesting comparison because they were built within one year and four blocks from one another, by allies in the American War (the United States and the Republic of Vietnam). Although they both used screen walls and air conditioning to shape their interior climate, the resulting environments were the opposite of one another: while the Independence Palace layered conditions and tempered spaces to create a negotiable continuum between exterior and interior, the Embassy used the same elements to create a secure barrier between inside and outside.

The Independence Palace

  • 70 The formal similarity between all the stylistically-diverse entries may be because they needed to (...)
  • 71 Nam-Sơn Ngo Viet, “Stories of the Independence Palace” published in German as “Die Geschichte(n) d (...)

32The Independence Palace in Ho Chi Minh City sits on the former site of the Norodom Palace (1871), the neo-Baroque home to the French Governor Generals of Cochinchina. (fig. 4) The original palace was bombed in 1962, and the president of South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm, sponsored a competition to design its replacement. Although all of the entries maintained the original building’s tripartite organization (a central pavilion connected by colonnaded wings to flanking end pavilions), they ranged stylistically from neo-classical recreations of the original building to various hybrid Asian styles to one predominantly modernist proposal, the winning entry by Ngô Viết Thụ.70 A graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Thụ was the only Asian to win the Rome Prize and had apparently returned to South Vietnam at Diệm’s request.71 The main façade of Thụ’s scheme consisted of an elevated horizontal volume, set on stone-clad piers, with a flat concrete roof supported by slender exterior columns.

Figure 4: Independence Palace, Ngô Viết Thụ, Ho Chi Minh City, 1966.

Figure 4: Independence Palace, Ngô Viết Thụ, Ho Chi Minh City, 1966.

Source: Photo by Andrew Cruse, 2020.

  • 72 “Construction and repair of the Independence Palace 1963-1968, Volume 10: Inauguration ceremony of (...)

33In addition to these modernist elements, the building also included significant regional and symbolic references. In his speech at the building’s opening, Thụ claimed its Beaux-Arts plan represented auspicious Chinese characters for “good luck” and “prosperity.” The centrally located roof pavilion recalled a portion of the citadel in Huế, seat of Nguyễn dynasty (1802-1945). And the screen wall, most visible on the main façade, resembled internodal sections of bamboo, recalling the common vernacular building material.72

34The screen wall was a collaboration between Thụ and the artist Nguyễn Văn Thế, who was responsible for the building’s sculptural program. While Thế developed the specific form of the 2.3-meter-tall screen elements, Thụ determined its larger role in the building’s formal and spatial arrangements. In his speech, Thụ referred to the screen as rèm hoa đá, literally a “flower stone curtain.” The term hoa (flower) recalls the traditional flower windows discussed above, while đá (curtain) likely referred to the wall being non-loadbearing, like the vernacular examples discussed above.

  • 73 The sketch was published in Thế-giới tự-do (The Free World in Vietnam), a general interest monthly (...)
  • 74 “Construction and repair of the Independence Palace,” SRPO, NAC, no. 23626, op. cit. (note 72).
  • 75 Daniel A. Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate, op. cit. (note 10), p. 16-18.

35Thụ further clarified his intentions for the screen in a composite sketch published in 1966.73 (fig. 5) There, a sequence of drawings moves from the planetary scale to the building detail. The sequence begins with the revolution of the Earth around the sun, showing the Earth’s location at the annual equinoxes and solstices. To the left, the Palace plan shows the main façade facing northeast, axially aligned with Thống Nhất Boulevard (today Lê Duẩn Boulevard). The building is located north of the equator, meaning that the sun falls primarily on its southern side. The northern facade would have the least amount of solar exposure. As Thụ explained in another description of the project, his intention for the screen wall was to bring light into the building, not to keep it out.74 The lower half of the drawing shows a plan and perspectival view of sun coming through the screen on the winter solstice (the shortest day of the year, with the lowest sun angles). This sketch positions the building within a planetary system. As Daniel Barber has described, such images were a central part of a mid-century climatic modernism.75

Figure 5: Ngô Viết Thụ’s sketch of the Independence Palace screen wall,

Figure 5: Ngô Viết Thụ’s sketch of the Independence Palace screen wall,

Source: Thế-giới tự-do, 1966.

36While many similar images demonstrated how a building’s brise-soleil blocked the sun’s overheating rays, Thụ’s sketch shows that the screen of the Independence Palace did the opposite: it reflected more light into the building. Furthermore, neither Thụ nor Thế designed the specific form of the screen based on the geometric relationship between the building’s façade and site-specific sun angles. They instead saw it as part of the building’s sculptural program. Thus, the sketch paradoxically suggested the building was part of a scientific modernism, when instead it place in the design was closer to a beaux-arts model.

  • 76 “Installation of air conditioning system and purchase of equipment for the Independence Palace 196 (...)
  • 77 From 1922-1967, ASHRAE published yearly Guides containing a variety comfort charts. For example, s (...)

37Although the Independence Palace had been under construction since 1962, the design team did not request proposals for the central air conditioning system until June 1964. The technical specifications for the air conditioning required the system to provide a 7° C difference from the outdoor temperature and limit relative humidity to a specific range.76 This was different from a standard engineering approach to specifying interior climate, which referred to an absolute comfort range shown on a comfort chart. Such charts were based on physiological research and did not consider specific climatic conditions.77 The design team sent this brief to five Saigon-based engineering firms, each representing a different American air conditioning manufacturer. The winning bid was from Brownell Lane Engineering Company for a Westinghouse system. The company’s proposed six-month installation schedule meant that they would complete the air conditioning system just before the building’s official opening. Although the design team required that the system be well integrated with the building’s interiors, this late schedule may explain the exposed ductwork in some of the building’s more prominent areas such as the Banquet and Cabinet Meeting Rooms.

38The screen wall and the air conditioning of the Independence Palace worked together to create a gradient of comfort from the tropical conditions outside to the air-conditioned rooms nested within the plan. Thụ placed an operable centre-pivot window immediately behind each of the precast concrete screen sections. In back of the main façade, this wall opened onto a 7-meter-tall veranda-type space stretching the length of the screened façade. (fig. 6) As discussed above, such spaces were common in screened modernist buildings, such as the General Science Library, although they were typically located outside of the weather walls. At the Independence Palace, this space was located within the building’s weather enclosure. However, it was not directly air conditioned. The air-conditioned rooms (the Conference and Banquet Rooms on the first floor, and the Presidential and Vice-Presidential Reception Rooms on the second floor) were through large openings on the interior wall behind the screen. These openings were filled with glass walls with double doors and fabric curtains. These curtains worked like the exterior “stone curtain” and pivot windows, allowing occupants to adjust the interior climate and lighting within the centrally located rooms.

Figure 6: Independence Palace interior, Ngô Viết Thụ, Ho Chi Minh City, 1966.

Figure 6: Independence Palace interior, Ngô Viết Thụ, Ho Chi Minh City, 1966.

Source: Photo by Andrew Cruse, 2020.

39Tempered by form and materials, and mechanically conditioned, the Independence Palace’s interior environments reflect a complex interaction that defies simple categorization as traditional or modern, natural or artificial. Collectively, the screen and air conditioning connected outdoor spaces to indoor ones in a dynamic process of negotiation. The screen and back-up windows brought air and light into the building’s veranda-like space while the air conditioning system cooled important ceremonial rooms in relationship to the weather outside. Building occupants could adjust the interior climate with the pivot windows, the doors and fabric curtains, and the thermostats. The conditions of tropical comfort produced in the building resulted from the combined effects of its ichnographically-rich massing and screen, its spatial organization, and its air conditioning technology in ways that paralleled the building’s hybrid architectural style.

United States Embassy in Saigon

  • 78 Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies, New York, NY: Princ (...)
  • 79 Joseph L. Dees, “New Chancery Dedicated in Saigon,” United States Department of State News Letter, (...)
  • 80 Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy, op. cit. (note 78), p. 171.

40When the contractor RMK-BRJ completed the Unites States Embassy in Saigon in 1967, it was both a relic of an earlier age of American embassy design and a precursor of what was to come. (fig. 7) While American architects initially designed embassies in the tropics to alleviate high heat and humidity, they hardened a later generation to resist attack in politically “hot” regions. Jane Loeffler has called the screen wall the “defining cliché of the [American] embassy building program in the 1950s,”78 a sentiment echoed by contemporary commentators.79 The fashion for screen walled embassies had begun as part of the U.S. State Department’s program of projecting cultural leadership abroad, while addressing local climate in tropical regions. Starting with Edward Durrell Stone’s New Delhi Embassy (1959), architects used screens in countries where air conditioning was a luxury, and electricity was costly and undependable. Projects for screened embassy buildings appeared in Accra, Baghdad, Basra, and Manila, among other cities. Although touted in the architectural press as “worth their weight in air conditioning equipment,”80 most of the screens did not respond to local climatic knowledge or the site’s wind and solar orientation. Instead, they indiscriminately wrapped glass boxes, typically organized around double-loaded corridors or courtyards.

Figure 7: U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Curtis and Roth, and Adrian Wilson and Associates, Ho Chi Minh City, 1967.

Figure 7: U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Curtis and Roth, and Adrian Wilson and Associates, Ho Chi Minh City, 1967.

Source: Bettmann Archive, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0, 2018.

  • 81 Arthur Q. Davis, It Happened by Design: The Life and Work of Arthur Q. Davis, Jackson, MS: Univers (...)
  • 82 “Ismay Mary Mykolyk” Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. URL: https://dna.bwaf.org/architect/m (...)

41The New Orleans firm Curtis and Davis originally designed the new U.S. Embassy in Saigon in 1956. Principal Arthur Davis had studied with Walter Gropius at Harvard and later worked for Eero Saarinen, both of whom were active in the State Department’s embassy program. The firm was known for modernist work that integrated regional elements from New Orleans’ subtropical climate.81 Their portfolio included a number of buildings featuring prominent screen facades, including the Caribe Building (New Orleans, 1954), the Main Branch of the New Orleans Public Library (1957), and IBM Building (Pittsburgh, 1963). The lead designer for the Saigon embassy, Ismay Mary Mykolyk, was born a British citizen in Nairobi, Kenya. She received her education in England and Canada before arriving in New Orleans in the early 1950s.82 A sketch of the Curtis and Davis proposal shows a six-story rectangular volume surrounded by a screen wall above an open ground floor. (fig. 8) Openings in the screen on the second and sixth floors show plantings poking through the perforated wall, suggesting perimeter patio spaces and a roof garden. Although State Department’s Architectural Advisory Committee approved the project, more senior figures in the Department postponed it several times, likely due to political instability in South Vietnam.

Figure 8: Proposal for the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Curtis and Roth, 1956.

Figure 8: Proposal for the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Curtis and Roth, 1956.

Source: Curtis and Davis Project Photographs, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Tulane University Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, SEAA-175, Frank Lotz Miller, photographer.

  • 83 “New U.S. Embassy Opens in Saigon; Building Designed to Thwart Most Types of Attack,” The New York (...)
  • 84 “L’ambassade des États-Unis à Saïgon,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, vol. 45, no. 167, May-June 19 (...)
  • 85 Joseph L. Dees, “New Chancery Dedicated in Saigon,” op. cit. (note 79), p. 18.

42The Department of State restarted the Saigon embassy project after the Việt Cộng attacked the existing embassy on the 30th of March 1965. This was the first attack on a U.S. Embassy that claimed American lives, and it triggered the State Department to require all American embassy buildings to be hardened against attack. Two days after the Saigon assault, President Johnson secured preliminary congressional funding for the new building, and by October RMK-BRJ began construction. The Los Angeles architecture and engineering firm of Adrian Wilson Associates, which held several military contracts in South Vietnam and had branch offices in the region, took over the project. While Adrian Wilson kept the basic Curtis and Davis design, the role of the building’s screen changed: rather than a culturally and climatically open screen, it became a protective shield against military attack. As the on-site architect explained, “security is our primary consideration here.”83 Indeed the pattern of the site’s three-meter- tall concrete perimeter wall matched that of the building screen, further emphasizing the screen’s protective role. The screen wall consists of individual terrazzo units, supported on spandrel beams set 1.5 meters off the building’s weather wall. Unlike Curtis and Davis’ original sketch, the space between the screen and the weather wall appears unoccupiable. The weather wall was masonry with shatterproof Plexiglas windows.84 The building interior, illuminated with fluorescent fixtures, and decorated with “modern Scandinavian design.”85 was cooled by a 175-ton central air conditioning system. Such an interior was climatically a world away from the one outdoors.

43American diplomats and architects had conceived the U.S. Embassy’s screen wall in the spirit of openness, both political and climatic, but when the wall was built, the need for security was paramount. What had historically been a symbol of cultural openness and climatic engagement had instead become a protective barrier. In this sense, the screen wall reinforced the climatic separation of the building’s air conditioning, a technology Americans used elsewhere in South Vietnam to create climatically and politically separate spaces. Together, the screen wall and the air conditioning worked to separate a stable interior climate from unstable geopolitical one outside.

  • 86 Tim Doling, Exploring Saigon- Chợ Lớn, op. cit. (note 35), p. 289.

44Rather than opposite approaches to environmental control, the Independence Palace and the U.S. Embassy show a curious parallel: how screen walls and air conditioning in tropical Vietnam could be used in mutually reinforcing ways. The two buildings worked to very different climatic ends—the Palace promoted an openness in its use of the screen wall and air conditioning, while the Embassy created separation. Yet these two different climatic approaches mirrored the buildings’ individual political histories. On 30 April 1975, Việt Cộng fighters overran the Independence Palace, symbolically ending the war. Later that year, a conference on national reunification took place there and the building was renamed Reunification Hall. As the interior climate unified interior and exterior, it was the setting for the reunification of North and South Vietnam. It is now used to host visiting dignitaries and as a tourist site. The fortified U.S. Embassy did not fare as well. Its rooftop was the scene of the dramatic helicopter evacuations at the war’s end. In a poetic parallel to its air conditioned past, it was later used by the Vietnamese national oil company, PetroVietnam, before being handed back to the United States following the reestablishment of diplomatic ties in 1995.86 It was demolished in 1998. The parallels between comfort, climate, and politics highlight large socio-political definitions of comfort. These play out in the context of tropical Vietnam in ways that may seem paradoxical and contradictory but demonstrate how comfort is a negotiated condition—physiological, psychological, energetic, social and political—not a static state.

Conclusion

  • 87 “Vietnam: Die Rückkehr des Klimas,” ARCH+, no. 227, Spring 2017. This is the second in a two-part (...)
  • 88 Conversation with Shunri Nishizawa on 13 January 2020.
  • 89 In one example, the clients of Võ Trọng Nghĩa Stacking Green house recount the story here: Mike Iv (...)

45A recent issue of the German architecture journal ARCH+ focused on the “return of climate” in some contemporary Vietnamese architecture.87 The issue documents this return through visually appealing screen walls and vibrant, open interior spaces of the featured buildings. (Many also contain split-system air conditioners, although these are often discreetly located.) Such attention to the interaction of architecture and climate in Vietnam grows richer when placed into the historical context outlined here, specifically, in two ways. First, an historical perspective shows how architects in colonial and postcolonial contexts have long embraced Vietnam’s humid tropical climate as a source of identity and comfort. Hébrard’s style indochinois, and the work of Nguyễn Cao Luyện, Hoàng Như Tiếp, Ngô Viết Thụ, and Lê Văn Lắm, to name a few, show the range of architectural styles and spatial organizations that architects in tropical Vietnam have used. This collection of actors also demonstrates the diversity of backgrounds and political contexts in which such work was produced. The architects of the Binh Thanh House follow a similar pattern. As a student in Japan, Võ Trọng Nghĩa met Shunri Nishizawa and Daisuke Sanuki at the University of Tokyo. The three later formed a partnership, named Vo Trong Nghia Architects, in Ho Chi Minh City. The firm is well-known internationally for their “green architecture.” Many of their projects actively engage with the tropical climate as part of the building’s exterior expression and interior organization—these include the House for Trees (2014), the Stacked Planters House (2017), and the Breathing House (2019). Although the Japanese partners have since left the practice, Nishizawa opened his own office, nishizawa architects, in 2015. Part of Nishizawa’s reason for staying in Vietnam was to “stay uncontrolled”;88 that is, to embrace the country’s physical and cultural climates, which he finds full of design potential. One can see such an approach in his recent project, the Restaurant for Shade (Ho Chi Minh City, 2018). (fig. 9) There Nishizawa extends a spatially ambiguous steel and shade fabric structure beyond a tile roof supported by a wood structure. The hybrid spaces that result contains oases of breeze, coolth, and shade helped by trees, fans, and suspended air conditioners. The overall effect emphasizes the ephemeral delights of tropical comfort over a clearly defined architectural form. Such an embrace of humid, tropical climate contrasts sharply with the negative views of the tropics that emerged largely from the temperate West. Indeed, any negative discussions of climate related to these contemporary buildings is concerned with the urban noise and air pollution rather than the meteorological climate.89

Figure 9: Restaurant for Shade, nishizawa architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2018.

Figure 9: Restaurant for Shade, nishizawa architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2018.

Source: Photo by Hiroyuki Oki, 2018.

  • 90 Jiat-Hwee Chang, “Tropical Variants of Sustainable Architecture: A Postcolonial Perspective,” in C (...)
  • 91 The building was Vietnam’s first leed Platinum office and met the German DGNB Gold sustainability (...)
  • 92 “Deutsches Haus Vietnam,” xia intelligente architektur, 12 October 2018.

46Contemporary commentators often frame Vietnam’s “return to climate” within ideas about sustainable architecture that favor passive technologies like screen walls over active ones like air conditioning. A second reason why it is important to historically situate this work is that it highlights the importance of socio-political contexts in how architects and engineers use active and passive technologies. As Jiat-Hwee Chang has observed, framing sustainable architecture in the tropics (and elsewhere) as a technical issue misses the often controversial social, cultural, and political problems that underlie the projects.90 In the case of Vietnam, the different socio-political contexts of the U.S. Embassy and the Independence Palace led to their architects using the same elements in entirely different ways. One can see how such a technical discourse on tropical sustainability can lead to buildings whose comfort is completely disengaged from the tropical context. The Deutsches Haus in Ho Chi Minh City (gmp architekten, 2017) is presented as an award-winning example of climate-sensitive sustainable design even though it is a sealed and air-conditioned glass tower.91 While the architects claim that, with air conditioning and solar control glass, the profession has forgotten how to deal adaptively with the tropical climate,92 the examples presented here show that this is clearly not the case. We can see such a hybrid approach in the Independence Palace, the hospitals of Trần Đình Quyền, the Bureau of Civil Design’s housing-related comfort research, and many contemporary examples of residential work. The Deutsches Haus instead seems to adhere to PMV-like comfort standards that effectively prohibit such a dynamic relationship between indoor and outdoor climates.

47Architects can often be unreliable narrators of their own work. In connecting natural ventilation to a traditional lifestyle and air conditioning to a modern one, the architects of the Binh Thanh House misrepresent what they have achieved. One instead should see the tropical comforts that the building creates as a recent example of the ongoing negotiation between climate, the building’s formal and technical aspects, and its occupants in Vietnam’s entangled socio-political history. Understanding this as a layered, hybrid, and at times paradoxical narrative reveals how questions of comfort have and continue to preoccupy architects, questions that are gaining in relevance in a rapidly warming world.

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Notes

1 “Binh Thanh House,” Architecture and Urbanism, no. 550, 2016, p. 148.

2 I interviewed Nishizawa at the Binh Thanh House on 13 January 2020 while conducting fieldwork in Ho Chi Minh City.

3 In general terms, Vietnam is in the tropical zone between 8° and 23° north latitude. According to the Köppen Climate Classification, the country has three tropical zones that are all characterized by high humidity, high solar radiation, and high average yearly rainfall. They are the humid subtropical in the north, tropical monsoon in the centre, and tropical savannah in the south.

4 For Vietnam, see Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial: Repenser le métissage, Paris: CTHS; INHA, 2016 (L’Art et l’essai) and Christina Schwenkel, Building Socialism: The Afterlife of East German Architecture in Urban Vietnam, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. For the wider case of Southeast Asia see Caroline Herbelin (ed.), “Editorial: Paradoxical Southeast Asia”, ABE Journal, no. 11, 2017; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.3729 and Jiat-Hwee Chang and Imran bin Tajudeen (eds.), Southeast Asia’s Modern Architecture: Questions of Translation, Epistemology and Power, Singapore: NUS Press, 2019.

5 In this paper, I will use the geographical names (Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Indochina, North Vietnam, South Vietnam) that were current during the period I’m discussing. For Vietnamese proper names, I use the name order and diacritical marks in Vietnamese, unless the source that I am citing uses a westernized form of the name.

6 David Arnold, “‘Illusory Riches’: Representations of the Tropical World, 1840-1950,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 21, no. 1, March 2000, p. 6-18.

7 Gail Cooper, Air-conditioning America: Engineers and the controlled Environment, Baltimore, MD; London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998 (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology, 23).

8 Hannah le Roux, “Building on the boundary—modern architecture in the tropics,” Social Identities, vol. 10, no. 4, July 2004, p. 439-453. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/1350463042000258889. For a more recent assessment of the screens see Iain Jackson and Jessica Holland, The Architecture of Edwin Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew: Twentieth-Century Architecture, Pioneer Modernism and the Tropics, London: Taylor & Francis, 2014 (Ashgate Studies in Architecture), p. 184-193. Jackson and Holland report that Fry found the screens at Ibadan were “too much decoration… too much lace.”

9 Edward Durell Stone, The Evolution of an Architect, New York, NY: Horizon Press, 1962, p. 137-165.

10 For the Villa Baizeau, see Tim Benton, “La Villa Baizeau et le brise-soleil,” in Varoujan Arzoumanian and Patrick Bardou (eds.), Le Corbusier et la Méditerranée, [ouvrage réalisé à l’occasion de l’exposition Le Corbusier et la Méditerranée, Marseille, Centre de la Vieille Charité, 27 juin-27 septembre 1987], Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses ; Musées de Marseille, 1987, p. 125-129. For the Tour d’ombres, see Daniel Siret, “Le Corbusier Plans. 1950, Études d’ensoleillement, Tour d’ombres (Chandigarh),” Le Corbusier Plans, DVD, no. 11, Fondation Le Corbusier, Échelle-1 Codex Images International, 2006. For a recent general discussion of climatic modernism and Le Corbusier’s role see Daniel A. Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate: Design before Air Conditioning, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 24-63.

11 This was commonly explained in manuals for tropical building such as Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, Tropical Architecture in the Humid Zone, London: B.T. Batsford Ltd., 1956 and the Building Research Station’s Overseas Building Notes. For a discussion of the Overseas Building Notes see Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial networks, nature and technoscience, New York, NY: Routledge, 2019 (Architext series), p. 165-202.

12 Aladar Olgyay and Victor Olgyay, Solar Control and Shading Devices, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Examples in the book range from the tropical zone well into the temperate one, including London, Stockholm, and Minneapolis, Minnesota.

13 Ba Dang Nguyen, Vu Phuong Nguyen and Hoang Van Ta, Traditional Vietnamese Architecture, Hanoi: Thế Giới Publishers, 2013, passim.

14 I thank Ylan Vo for her help with these Vietnamese terms.

15 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 263-276.

16 For example, see Anh-Tuan Nguyen, Quoc-Bao Tran, Duc-Quang Tran and Sigrid Reiter, “An investigation of climate responsive design strategies of vernacular housing in Vietnam,” Building and Environment, vol. 46, no. 10, 2011, p. 2088-2106. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2011.04.019.

17 Miles Lewis, “breeze blocks” in Australian Building: A Cultural Investigation. URL: www.mileslewis.net/australian-building/. Accessed 27 September 2021.

18 I thank Ylan Vo and Shunri Nishizawa for their help with Vietnamese terms, and Qiannan Wang for her help with the Chinese term.

19 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 241-263.

20 Li Yanjuan, “The Spread and Influence of the Pottery Making Techniques from Guangdong Skiwan Kiln in Vietnam.” Journal of Archaeology & Museology, no. 2, 2019, p. 89-98. [in Chinese] I thank my student Qiannan Wang for this reference. Chợ Lớn was a centre for tile production by immigrants from Shiwan kiln area in Foshan. The Bình Tây Market (1928) in Chợ Lớn has many examples of such flower tiles.

21 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 251-260.

22 For a popular history and extensive catalogue of different screen block shapes and manufacturing processes see Rod Marshall and Barbara Marshall, Concrete Screen Blocks: The Power of Pattern, Palm Springs, CA: PSPF, 2018. An internet image search for the Vietnamese terms shows that they are still readily available in a large variety of shapes and sizes.

23 See the recent popular history Mel Schenck, Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-Century Vernacular Modernism, Helena, MT: Architecture Vietnam Books, 2020. See also two reports in mASEANa Project (ed.), The Report of mASEANa Project 2016: 2nd and 3rd International Conference, docomomo Japan, 2017. Truong Thanh Hai and Vu Thi Hong Hanh “History of modern architecture in Ho Chi Minh City” and Truong Ngoc Lan “History of modern architecture in Hanoi.”

24 Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 61-110. As Herbelin notes, Hébrard did not refer to his approach as the style indochinois until after he left the colony.

25 Ibid., p. 78.

26 Ibid., p. 98-99. Herbelin explains how Kruze, like Hébrard, was inspired by the regionalist work in Morocco by French architects Henri Prost, Albert Laprade, and Léon Bazin. Hébrard never taught at the ebai.

27 Ibid., p. 119-120. French hygiene manuals for residential buildings in the colony also emphasized the importance of ventilation. See Laura Victoir, “Hygienic Colonial Residences in Hanoi,” in Laura Victoir and Victor Zatsepine (eds.), Harbin to Hanoi: The Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2013 (Global Connections), p. 231-250.

28 Herbelin reports that Nguyễn Cao Luyện and Hoàng Như Tiếp saw the veranda as a colonial legacy. Caroline Herbelin, Architectures du Vietnam colonial, op. cit. (note 4), p. 119-120. For the entangled history of the veranda see Jay D. Edwards, “The Complex Origins of the American Domestic Piazza-Veranda-Gallery,” Material Culture, vol. 21, no. 2, 1989, p. 2-58. I thank Jiat-Hwee Chang for this reference.

29 William S. Logan, Hanoi: Biography of a City, Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000, p. 192. Logan quotes from Mary McCarthy, Hanoi, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1968, p. 47.

30 For Soviet guidelines, see Łukasz Stanek, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 72-73. The Hanoi campus was Giprovuz’s second campus in Southeast Asia. The first, in Burma, did not make extensive use of screen walls. For the Russian context in which this work was built see Richard Anderson, Russia, London: Reaktion Books, 2015 (Modern Architectures in History), p. 235-245.

31 Lê recounts the process of building the Children’s Palace in the context of North Vietnam in Le Van Lam “Practicing Modern Architecture in Vietnam: Hardships and Opportunities” in mASEANa Project (ed.), The Report of mASEANa Project 2016 2nd and 3rd International Conference, op. cit. (note 23), p. 18-19.

32 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Tim Winter, “Thermal Modernity and Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture, vol. 20, no. 1, 2015, p. 92-121. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1010095.

33 At mid-century, very few hotels existed in Hanoi. The best-known new hotel was the Thắng Lợi Hotel (1975). Designed by the Cuban architect Nicolás Quintana as part of a Cuban-North Vietnamese exchange for the 30th anniversary of the founding of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, it was not air conditioned.

34 Several of his buildings had innovative screen walls, including the Banque nationale pour le commerce et l’industrie (bnci) (1958), the Arc-en-Ciel Hotel (late 1960s).

35 Tim Doling, Exploring Saigon-Chợ Lớn: Vanishing heritage of Hồ Chí Minh City, Hanoi: Thế Giới Publishers, 2019, p. 101-103.

36 Personal communication with Mel Schenck, 8 January 2021.

37 Tim Doling, Exploring Saigon- Chợ Lớn, op. cit. (note 35), p. 242.

38 Personal communication with Mel Schenck 8 January 2021.

39 Mel Schenck, “The Largest Military Construction Project in History,” The New York Times, 16 January 2018.

40 John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibility and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, p. ix.

41 Julie Willis, Philip Goad and Cameron Logan, Architecture and the Modern Hospital: Nosokomeion to Hygeia, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019, p. 129-151. For a more detailed understanding of the mid-century use of air conditioning in American hospitals, see “Air Conditioning in the Prevention and Treatment of Disease,” in ashrae, Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning Guide 1960, vol. 38, New York, NY: ASRAE, 1960, p. 93-102. And Isadore Rosenfield, Hospitals: Integrated Design, [2nd ed.], New York, NY: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1951. I thank Johan Lagae for this reference.

42 A partial list includes the hospital in Gia Định (1966), Thống Nhất (1972), Huế (1972), and the Bình Dân Hospital in Saigon (early 1970s). After a period of “re-education” following the war, Quyền continued to work on hospitals throughout Vietnam. Phạm Trường GIANG “Trần Đình Quyền: From medical student to hospital design specialist” 21 June 2017 [in Vietnamese]. URL: https://kienviet.net/2017/06/21/kts-tran-dinh-quyen-tu-sinh-vien-y-khoa-tro-thanh-nguoi-chuyen-thiet-ke-benh-vien/. Accessed 21 June 2021.

43 Nguyễn Hữu Thai “Trần Đình Quyền: “Hospital architecture needs to be airy and functional,” 6 May 2020 [in Vietnamese]. URL: https://www.tapchikientruc.com.vn/chuyen-muc/kts-tran-dinh-quyen-kien-truc-benh-vien-can-thong-thoang-va-dam-bao-cong-nang.html. Accessed 21 June 2021.

44 Podium and slab buildings had high-rise slabs for inpatient wards over a ground level building with administration, diagnostic, surgical, and outpatient, and other departments. Racetrack plans had internalized cores with service and ancillary spaces surrounded by peripheral ward rooms serviced by a “racetrack” corridor. Jeanne Kisacky, Rise of the Modern Hospital: An Architectural History of Health and Healing, 1870-1940, Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017, p. 338-345.

45 In traditional Sino-Vietnamese cosmogony, health is a balance between the oppositional forces of âm and dương, much like the Chinese idea of yin and yang. These can be understood as heat and cold. Any imbalance between them, such as staying in a cold room, can lead to illness. Charles Kemp, Refugee and immigrant health: a handbook for health professionals, Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 349-350.

46 A possible precedent for the Thống Nhất Hospital was the Fort Hamilton Veterans’ Administration Hospital (Brooklyn NY, 1952) by Gordon Bunshaft of SOM. Inpatient rooms were in an unairconditioned slab that included sun shading, while air conditioned buildings at the ground level housed administration, diagnostic, surgical, outpatients, and other departments. See Julie Willis, Philip Goad and Cameron Logan, Architecture and the Modern Hospital, op. cit. (note 41), p. 175.

47 Chiêu Danh Bùi, “Where Uncle Ho rested during the war years,” 27 October 2011 [in Vietnamese]. URL:https://tennguoidepnhat.net/2011/10/27/n%C6%A1i-bac-h%E1%BB%93-yen-ngh%E1%BB%89-trong-nh%E1%BB%AFng-nam-thang-chi%E1%BA%BFn-tranh/. Accessed 21 June 2021.

48 Tuan Pham, “The process of building Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, Special work with political and cultural significance,” [in Vietnamese]. URL: https://www.bqllang.gov.vn/tin-tuc/tin-tu-ban-quan-ly-lang/4161-qua-trinh-xay-dung-lang-chu-tich-ho-chi-minh-cong-trinh-dac-biet-co-y-nghia-chinh-tri-van-hoa.html Accessed 15 January2021.

49 Chiêu Danh Bùi, “Where Uncle Ho rested during the war years,” op. cit. (note 47).

50 William S. Logan, Hanoi, op. cit. (note 29), p. 192-196.

51 Chiêu Danh Bùi, “Where Uncle Ho rested during the war years,” op. cit. (note 47).

52 Gail Cooper, Air-conditioning America, op. cit. (note 7), p. 51-79.

53 David Arnold, The Problem of Nature: Environment, Culture and European Expansion, Oxford; Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996 (New Perspective on the Past). French geographer Pierre Gourou espoused such a view of tropical Indochina. See John Kleinen, “Tropicality and Topicality: Pierre Gourou and the Genealogy of French Colonial Scholarship on Rural Vietnam,” Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, vol. 26, no. 3, 2005, p. 339-358. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9493.2005.00228.x.

54 Jiat-Hwee Chang and Daniel J. Ryan, “Editorial: Historicizing Entanglements of Architecture and Comfort beyond the Temperate Zone - part 1,” ABE Journal, no. 17, 2020. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/7998. Accessed 29 September 2021.

55 P.O. Fanger, Thermal Comfort, Copenhagen: Danish Technical Press, 1970.

56 ISO 7730, Ergonomics of the Thermal Environment, Geneva: ISO, 1994. And Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy, Atlanta, GA: ASHRAE, 2004 (ANSI/ASHRAE, 55-2004).

57 For Japan see Shin-ichi Tanabe and Ken-ichi Kimura, “Thermal comfort requirements under hot and humid conditions,” Proceedings of the First ASHRAE Far East Conference on Air Conditioning in Hot Climates, Singapore, Atlanta, GA: ASHRAE, 1989, p. 3-21. For Singapore see Richard De Dear, K.G. Leow and A. Ameen, “Thermal Comfort in the Humid Tropics—Part 1: Climate Chamber Experiments on Temperature Preferences in Singapore,” ASHRAE Transactions, no. 97, 1991, p. 874-879. URL: https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/thermal-comfort-in-the-humid-tropics-part-i-climate-chamber-exper. Accessed 29 September 2021.

58 For an account of early field studies by some later proponents of this methodology, see Michael A. Humphreys, Fergus Nicol and Susan Roaf, Adaptive Thermal Comfort: Foundations and Analysis, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2015, p. 9-27.

59 Michael A. Humphreys, “Field studies of thermal comfort compared and applied,” Building Research Establishment Current Paper, no. 76/75, August 1975.

60 Richard De Dear and Andris Auliciems, “Thermal Neutrality and Acceptability in Six Australian Field Studies,” in P.O. Fanger (ed.), CLIMA 2000, Copenhagen: VVS Kongres-VVS Messe, 1985, vol. 4, p. 103-108.

61 Richard De Dear and Gail Brager, Developing an Adaptive Model of Thermal Comfort and Preference: Final Report, [Atlanta, GA]: ASHRAE, 1997 (ASHRAE Research Project, 884).

62 ashrae, Thermal Environmental Conditions for Human Occupancy, Atlanta, GA: ASHRAE, 2004 (ASHRAE Standards).

63 Thomas Parkinson, Richard De Dear and Gail Brager, “Nudging the adaptive thermal comfort model,” Energy & Buildings, vol. 206, January 2020. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enbuild.2019.109559.

64 Thanh Son Le, “Ecological architecture as a forgotten opportunity in Vietnam,” MATEC Web of Conferences, vol. 193, 2018. Le identifies Vuong Quoc My's thesis: "The influence of climate on urban housing formation in North Vietnam" (1962) and Climate and Housing (1966), and the Pham Ngoc Dang Architecture Thermology (1966) as the earliest scientific studies of climate, comfort, and architecture in Vietnam. The basis of comfort research in housing, rather than commercial buildings, grew from mass housing programs. See Christina Schwenkel, Building Socialism, op. cit. (note 4) p. 184-192.

65 N.H. Dung, “Discussions of Human Thermal Comfort in Vietnam,” in Fergus Nicol, Michael A. Humphreys, Oliver Sykes and Susan Roaf, Standards for Thermal Comfort: Indoor Air Temperature Standards for the 21st Century, London: Chapman & Hall, 1995, p. 143-148.

66 American John Busch studied the impact of office comfort standards on the Thai energy standards while a PhD student at University of California, Berkeley. See John Busch, “Thermal Responses to the Thai Office Environment,” ASHRAE Transactions, no. 96 (part 1), 1990, p. 859-872. Tri Harso Karyono, a student of Fergus Nicol and Michael Humphreys, looked at similar issues in Malaysia. See T.H. Karyono, “Report on Thermal Comfort and Building Energy Studies in Jakarta,” Journal of Building and Environment, vol. 35, January 2020, p. 77-90. DOI: 10.1016/S0360-1323(98)00066-3.

67 Personal communication with Williamson, June 2021.

68 D.N. Pham, Bioclimatic architecture, Hanoi: Construction Publishing House, 2002. Discussed in Anh Tuan Nguyen, “Sustainable Housing in Vietnam: Climate Responsive Strategies to Optimize Thermal Comfort,” PhD Thesis, University of Liege, Liege, 2013.

69 The Vietnamese code TCVN 7438: 2004 Thermal Environment. This standard is based on the international standard ISO 7730 Ergonomics of the Thermal Environment, 1994.

70 The formal similarity between all the stylistically-diverse entries may be because they needed to reuse the existing foundation of the original Norodom Palace.

71 Nam-Sơn Ngo Viet, “Stories of the Independence Palace” published in German as “Die Geschichte(n) des Unabhängigkeitspalastes in Saigon,” ARCH+, no. 227, Spring 2017. Ngô-Viết Nam-Sơn is the son of Ngô Viết Thụ.

72 “Construction and repair of the Independence Palace 1963-1968, Volume 10: Inauguration ceremony of the Independence Palace,” srpo, nac, no. 23626.

73 The sketch was published in Thế-giới tự-do (The Free World in Vietnam), a general interest monthly magazine espousing Western values. This sketch is also published in Nam-Sơn Ngo Viet, “Stories of the Independence Palace” op. cit. (note 71), p. 19.

74 “Construction and repair of the Independence Palace,” SRPO, NAC, no. 23626, op. cit. (note 72).

75 Daniel A. Barber, Modern Architecture and Climate, op. cit. (note 10), p. 16-18.

76 “Installation of air conditioning system and purchase of equipment for the Independence Palace 1964-1968,” SRPO, NAC, no. 23508. The original document issued by the design team is in French.

77 From 1922-1967, ASHRAE published yearly Guides containing a variety comfort charts. For example, see ashrae, Heating, Ventilating, Air Conditioning Guide 1960, op. cit. (note 41), p. 68-73.

78 Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy: Building America’s Embassies, New York, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010, p 170.

79 Joseph L. Dees, “New Chancery Dedicated in Saigon,” United States Department of State News Letter, October 1967, p. 16-18.

80 Jane C. Loeffler, The Architecture of Diplomacy, op. cit. (note 78), p. 171.

81 Arthur Q. Davis, It Happened by Design: The Life and Work of Arthur Q. Davis, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2009.

82 “Ismay Mary Mykolyk” Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation. URL: https://dna.bwaf.org/architect/mykolyk-ismay-mary. Accessed 23 June 2021.

83 “New U.S. Embassy Opens in Saigon; Building Designed to Thwart Most Types of Attack,” The New York Times, 29 September 1967.

84 “L’ambassade des États-Unis à Saïgon,” L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, vol. 45, no. 167, May-June 1973, p. 23.

85 Joseph L. Dees, “New Chancery Dedicated in Saigon,” op. cit. (note 79), p. 18.

86 Tim Doling, Exploring Saigon- Chợ Lớn, op. cit. (note 35), p. 289.

87 “Vietnam: Die Rückkehr des Klimas,” ARCH+, no. 227, Spring 2017. This is the second in a two-part series on Vietnam directed by the magazine’s feature’s editor Anh-Linh Ngo. The first is “Vietnam: Die Stille Avantgarde,” ARCH+, no. 226, Autumn 2016.

88 Conversation with Shunri Nishizawa on 13 January 2020.

89 In one example, the clients of Võ Trọng Nghĩa Stacking Green house recount the story here: Mike Ives, “In Vietnam, a Traditional Home Design Goes Green,” The New York Times, 7 June 2012. URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/greathomesanddestinations/08iht-reho08.html . Accessed 21 June 2021.

90 Jiat-Hwee Chang, “Tropical Variants of Sustainable Architecture: A Postcolonial Perspective,” in C. Creig Crysler, Stephen Cairns and Hild Heynen, The SAGE Handbook of Architectural Theory, London: Sage, 2012, p. 624.

91 The building was Vietnam’s first leed Platinum office and met the German DGNB Gold sustainability standard.

92 “Deutsches Haus Vietnam,” xia intelligente architektur, 12 October 2018.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1: Street elevation of the Binh Thanh House, Vo Trong Nghia Architects and Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2013.
Crédits Source: Photo by Andrew Cruse, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,7M
Titre Figure 2: Section of the Binh Thanh House, Vo Trong Nghia Architects and Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2013.
Crédits Source: Vo Trong Nghia Architects, Sanuki + Nishizawa Architects.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 655k
Titre Figure 3: General Science Library, Bùi Quang Hanh and Nguyễn Hữu Thiện, Ho Chi Minh City, 1971.
Crédits Source: Photo by Alexandre Garel, 2017.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-3.jpg
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Titre Figure 4: Independence Palace, Ngô Viết Thụ, Ho Chi Minh City, 1966.
Crédits Source: Photo by Andrew Cruse, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-4.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,3M
Titre Figure 5: Ngô Viết Thụ’s sketch of the Independence Palace screen wall,
Crédits Source: Thế-giới tự-do, 1966.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-5.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 437k
Titre Figure 6: Independence Palace interior, Ngô Viết Thụ, Ho Chi Minh City, 1966.
Crédits Source: Photo by Andrew Cruse, 2020.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-6.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,4M
Titre Figure 7: U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Curtis and Roth, and Adrian Wilson and Associates, Ho Chi Minh City, 1967.
Crédits Source: Bettmann Archive, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0, 2018.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-7.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 1,1M
Titre Figure 8: Proposal for the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Curtis and Roth, 1956.
Crédits Source: Curtis and Davis Project Photographs, Southeastern Architectural Archive, Tulane University Special Collections, Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, SEAA-175, Frank Lotz Miller, photographer.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-8.jpg
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Titre Figure 9: Restaurant for Shade, nishizawa architects, Ho Chi Minh City, 2018.
Crédits Source: Photo by Hiroyuki Oki, 2018.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/12515/img-9.jpg
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Andrew Cruse, « Tropical Comforts in Vietnam »ABE Journal [En ligne], 19 | 2021, mis en ligne le 31 décembre 2021, consulté le 10 février 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/12515 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.12515

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Andrew Cruse

Associate Professor, The Ohio State University, Columbus, United States

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