Mel Schenck

Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture

Mid-Century Vernacular Modernism

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

"Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture" features beautiful architectural photography that illustrates the outstanding accomplishment of the people of southern Vietnam in developing a mid-century modernist architecture that is extraordinary in the world. Especially for Americans, Vietnam has been a war instead of a country. The world didn't notice that the Vietnamese were simultaneously constructing modern apartment buildings, houses, large public buildings, and public housing as they developed a new nation. And the world didn't anticipate that this architecture would be so overtly modernist rather than an adaption of traditional Vietnamese designs to the continuation of colonial architecture. In the mid-twentieth century, southern Vietnamese architects developed a version of modernist architecture that accommodated the tropical climate and reflected the identity of a newly-independent culture. It demonstrates the innate sense of design of Vietnamese and it represented the outlook of the people of southern Vietnam as they looked towards the future, even in the face of war. The vast quantity and quality of Vietnamese modernist buildings constructed throughout southern Vietnam made Vietnam an unrecognized 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 for dwellings. This architecture features an interplay between masses and voids that provides a much more vibrant version of modernist architecture. This style fills the gaps between the functionalism of the International Style and the quest for identity and spirit that has been lacking in modernism worldwide. American architect Mel Schenck is a long-term immigrant to Vietnam and has been studying this architecture since he was surprised by the extent and quality of modernist architecture in Saigon when he first lived there in 1971/72. He and photographer Alexandre Garel accumulated a database of 400 buildings and 4,000 photographs in southern Vietnam to serve a comprehensive analysis of the history and characteristics of this distinctive architecture. 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.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Architecture Vietnam Books
• Seitenzahl: 316
• Erscheinungstermin: 21. April 2020
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 216mm x 216mm x 21mm
• Gewicht: 911g
• ISBN-13: 9780578516585
• ISBN-10: 0578516586
• Artikelnr.: 59304873

Autorenporträt

Mel Schenck is an American architect with five decades of experience managing design and construction. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree at Montana State University in 1970 and a Master of Architecture degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. Mel began his career managing construction contracts to Vietnamese constructors for the U.S. Navy in Saigon and southern Vietnam in 1971/1972, where he became enamored with the Vietnamese mid-century modern architecture. After several years managing architectural projects in America, Mel managed the operations of KMD Architects, a San Francisco firm with offices in Asia and Mexico as well as major cities in the U.S. He returned to Vietnam in 2006 to direct master planning for a 325-hectare $1 billion resort and two new towns in the Ho Chi Minh City metropolitan area. He leads a weekly seminar on Vietnam modern architecture and history at the Hünh T¿n Phát Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City for university architecture and planning students, and is a member of the Society of Architectural Historians based in America. Mel contributed the chapter on Vietnamese modernist architecture for the 2018 book "Adventures in the Land of Modernism" published by the Modernist Society in Manchester, UK. Mel's article "The Largest Military Construction Project in History" was published in the New York Times on 16 January 2018. Mel is on Instagram as architecture.vietnam and on the internet at https://blog.architecturevietnam.com.