Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-Century Vernacular Modernism

Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-century Vernacular Modernism

Mel Schenck and photographer Alexandre Garel welcome you to view and understand the extraordinary modernist heritage architecture of southern Vietnam.

This book, Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-century Vernacular Modernism, features beautiful architectural photography that illustrates the outstanding accomplishment of the people of southern Vietnam in developing a mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture that is extraordinary in the world.

Over the past eight decades of architectural history since the Japanese occupation of Vietnam in WWII, southern Vietnamese architects developed a version of modernist architecture that accommodated the tropical climate and reflected the identity of a newly independent nation.

The vast quantity and quality of Vietnamese modernist architecture constructed throughout southern Vietnam made it a center of modernism in the world. Most importantly, the southern Vietnamese as a culture embraced modernism, and it became the vernacular architecture of the culture, especially for dwellings.

Architectural historians, aficionados of modernist architecture, and anyone interested in Vietnamese culture will find that this book is a positive story about Vietnamese aspirations for independence and the value of modernist architecture in living in the world today.

Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-century Vernacular Modernism is available as a full-color trade paperback in most international online bookstores. A separate version for distribution in Vietnam is available as a black-and-white paperback in Vietnamese bookstores.