Situating Modernity: The First Generation of Vietnamese Architects and the Search for a National Architecture

• In Event: An Architecture under Influence? Building between the Local and the Global and across the Colonial and the Postcolonial in Southeast Asia

Abstract

The architectural section of the Ecole des Beaux Arts of French Indochina opened in 1926. It’s the first to offer in the Indochinese Union, and most likely in Southeast Asia, architectural training in a beaux-arts style. The painter Victor Tardieu, founder of the school, conceived the program of the section as directly borrowing from that of the Ecole des Beaux Arts of Paris, all the while adapting it to the local context, as he did not wish to establish, in his words, “the artistically uprooted.“ To this end, he encouraged his students to work in a “modern“ style while taking inspiration from the principles and decors of vernacular architecture. After graduation, the architects, without completely putting aside the precepts they learned, distanced themselves from their education as they did not wish to be reduced to “local“ architects but in contrast sought to be compared to their Western counterparts. They therefore desired to participate in transnational modernity, without embracing without reservation the most radical developments of modernism. The aim of their work was above all creating habitation responding to the needs of their contemporaries. The object of this paper is to capture how these architects fashioned an architecture they thought through socially, aesthetically and politically between the local and the global, during the colonial period as well as the postcolonial period, when the influence of the USSR played a role.

Author

• Caroline Herbelin, Université de Toulouse-Jean-Jaurès