Remember from our Design Touches 2 posting that large gates are the primary "face" to the street for the typical Vietnamese house with narrow lots in the cities. The gates provide pedestrian and motorbike access, as well as ventilation when the gate is also the front wall of the house on the street. Here is another collection of gates that illustrate the design sensitivity exhibited by Vietnamese architects and metal craftsmen in Hồ Chí Minh City:
This set of gates for a large villa evoke medievel times. This is not a particularly good design, just a different set of choices.
While this set of gates is very light and modernist. The sign "nhà bán" means "for sale".
This evokes a classical mandarin composition in a modern style,
while this is a thoroughly asymetrical design using perhaps too many techniques of iron work.
This is my favorite -- a layering of screens and diagonals, with the chevrons of the house doors in the back playing counterpoint to the verticals and diagonals of the gates. Notice that consciously-different design decisions were made for each segment of the gates created by the diagonals.
