I used to say that Vietnamese modernist architecture is uniquely seen in Vietnam. I might be partially wrong.
Vietnam is known for the special language of modernist design seen in institutional and private works that express something richer, more vibrant, and more humane than examples in conventional modernist centers. However, a lesser-known fact is that this language travelled beyond Vietnam, to Paris. Võ Thành Nghĩa's Vietnamese Embassy in France was a rare example of Vietnamese architecture exported to the West.
Abandoned in the middle of Paris’s bourgeois 16th district, the Vietnamese Embassy in France seems like a lost son. Designed around 1973 by architect Võ Thành Nghĩa, and built in 1977, the project was one of the first international affirmations of the current Vietnamese state. Even though the Vietnam War (the American War to the Vietnamese) ended on 30 April 1975, the war’s end had really started two years earlier with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973, which kick-started the withdrawal of American troops and the advances of the Vietnamese forces to liberate the South. It was within this context that the then Democratic Republic of Vietnam acquired this plot of land at the corner of the Boileau hamlet in Paris for its new embassy. This project was a projection of the newly independent and unified state two years later.
While most famous mid-century institutional modernist architecture is found in southern Vietnam, this building is, this time, a nationalist gesture from the North. Nevertheless, we can see many linguistic similarities. The design is inspired by traditional architecture: overhanging roofs, uprising eaves, intricate rhythm, and details. Due to the local climate, tropical devices like brise-soleil or double walls in Vietnam could not be used. Yet architect Võ Thành Nghĩa managed to break down the proportions, making the building more human-scaled and achieving the same kind of grace seen in Vietnam.
More surprisingly, it participated in the same game of abstractions and structures, a creative and joyful play seen not only across institutional buildings in the South, but also across vernacular modernist shophouses designed by the general masses. Concrete beams, columns, slabs, et cetera were turned into visual entities, put together in a harmonious and poetic composition. This demonstrates a kind of transversal cultural sensitivity and aesthetic that architecture can reveal, not only between institutions and the masses, but also across geographical regions.
This building has been planned for demolition, and a new embassy has been imagined on the same plot. Even though its presence may one day become only a memory, its existence has embodied multiple significant historical processes of the twentieth century, those which are usually overlooked today, yet hold great importance for the future. Beyond being one of the most audacious acts in decolonisation history and people’s will to self-determinate, this design reflects fundamental cultural mechanisms that inform architecture. Unlike the austerity usually associated with modernism in the West, through taste, symbolism, and creativity, Vietnamese modernism erects buildings of cultural and environmental relevance, the same relevance that later created Vietnamese vernacular modernism, where an architectural language was adopted by the general masses to become a collective and democratic act of building.
Sources: Commission du vieux Paris,Compte-rendu du séance plénière du 19 septembre 2024 https://cdn.paris.fr/paris/2024/11/12/seance-du-19-septembre-2024-avec-compression-ej8o.pdf?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAYnJpZBEwRlBrZ25ybTBWbDBvR2Nka3NydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR5pHApG7-LDnuRs7AI7WCjkmXfZhPFVs3SvERrKOmMAQGxrbbAYuQOqzm46tw_aem_TXdjB_VxYsvhQWn-83CDPw