Please respond to this informal poll by clicking on the word comments below this posting and leaving your preference for the types of residential architectural style presented below. Feel free to offer your opinions about these styles and why you have selected the style you like.
Vietnamese architects and builders present a wide variety of choices of architectural styles in the Vietnamese residential market. What is different between the USA and Vietnam in this market is that there is a much larger selection of modernist styles in Vietnam. In the USA, you usually have to build your own home to achieve a modernist house since developers of most housing developments and subdivisions assume most Americans prefer historicist styles.
In the townhouse market of Ho Chi Minh City, it seems that the ratio of modernist to historicist architectural styles is roughly half-and-half. I attribute that to a greater innate design sense in Vietnamese people and a long history of modernist architecture in Vietnam. Obviously then I am biased towards modernist architecture, but please don't tailor your answer to fit my expectations. I am trying to learn what people really like and why.
Here are a couple of representative examples of the two broad categories of townhouse or villa design in HCMC. Both of these homes are built two blocks from each other in the new urban area of Nhiêu Lộc south of Phan Xich Long Street along the Thị Nghè canal.
This first choice is an extremely historicist design with evocative emotional references to the European past. It is definitely not a French Colonial style, which you might expect to see in Vietnam. Remember that this house is only one example of a very broad variety of historicist styles used in Saigon.
The second choice is a modernist design that I consider to be very well executed. Again, this example is intended to be an example of a wide variety of modernist ideas available in HCMC.
These examples are somewhat extreme in the range of styles exhibited in HCMC, but stand to make the choices as clear as possible. Please let me know what you think.
