Welcome to the website and blog of architect Mel Schenck. After forty-five years of professional practice, I have devoted the past decade to research and writing about architecture. My initial effort at finding out how Vietnamese architects in the mid-twentieth century developed an exceptional version of modernist architecture resulted in the book Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture. You can find out more about this book by clicking on the ‘book’ link to the left. My conclusions about this architectural history can be found by clicking on the ‘category’ button to the left and going down to the ‘Modernism’ menu item.

I am now researching what I consider to be my ‘life’s work’ — defining the origins and characteristics of the holistic architecture of the Information Age. I began thinking about this intellectual force with my undergraduate architecture thesis in 1970, and again with my master’s thesis in 1981. This architecture is beginning to subsume the modernist architecture of the Industrial Age as the world changes from a mechanistic sense of reality to a reality based on perceiving the world and its events from a whole perspective. My emerging conclusions about holistic architecture are found by clicking on the ‘category’ button to the left and going down to the ‘Holism’ menu item.

Defining holistic architecture requires development of an architectural theory that persuades the academy and the profession that the time has come to embrace this new reality and new architecture. I hope to publish a book that does this by the year 2030. My initial thoughts and conclusions about this theory are found by clicking on the ‘category’ button to the left and going down to the ‘Theory’ menu item.

I have lived in Vietnam since 2005 and am a permanent resident immigrant. Most of my examples of modernist and holistic architecture will be buildings designed by Vietnamese architects, who I believe are leading the world at this time in the holistic architecture of small buildings including houses.