There is construction work going on everywhere in all of the neighborhoods of Ho Chi Minh City. While there are a fair number of high-rise buildings, bridges, highways, and housing subdivisions under construction, the bulk of work being done here is small-scale residential improvements along the small lanes within the large city blocks of Saigon. My posting on 19 April 2007 described these neighborhoods as part of the urban fabric of the city.
Where home-owners are not tearing down their smaller houses and building much taller homes, they are constantly remodeling to add new features to their existing homes, or to raise the rooftop by another story.
Down the hẻm from me, an old villa was torn down over a couple of days and construction begun on five new 4-story houses at the same time, each on 4-meter wide by 12-meter long lots. Three of the new houses were of a pop style using historicist (architectural styles adapted from the past) design elements:
The remaining two houses around the corner are of excellent modernist design:
These two modernist houses are now my favorites, and I need to return to them on a sunny day (rather rare around HCMC this month) to catch some better photos of them.
I am not sure whether one land owner decided to build three pop traditional design houses and two modernist houses for sale, or he sold the lots and the new owners made their own choices. I will try to find out.
