With the landscaping finally completed on my house in Ho Chi Minh City, I wanted to have the house photographed by a professional architectural photographer. Beyond posting a few snapshots of the house for my friends and relatives on Facebook, why would I want to photograph the house?
© Oki Hiroyuki
This project is definitely my last hurrah. In a 43-year career in architecture, I had never designed or worked on a house. My career roles have been primarily management of large projects rather than design, so this project has been special for me in validating whatever design talent I exhibited back in architecture schools a long time ago.
© Oki Hiroyuki
This house is my design experiment. I believe that architecture should represent the values and changes of contemporary times. Although trained as a modernist, I have long been interested in architecture fit for the information age. Recent large projects around the world, including museums, cultural centers, and government buildings, have clearly shown the direction for architecture in the information age. Designed by architects such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid, they display many of the hallmarks of our times, including randomness, dissonance, and amorphousness. Such an architecture can really only be realised through computers and parametric software to deal with multiple variables required in the information age, resulting in complex free-form materials and forms.
© Oki Hiroyuki
But the design of houses has thus far escaped this movement, just as design of houses largely avoided modernism over the past 100 years. Houses around the world are usually either utilitarian or evocative of past cultures (e.g., Victorian or French Colonial). So this house is my experiment in illustrating the potential for information-age architecture in houses. And southern Viet Nam offers the easiest opportunity to apply these ideas because the form of the urban house in Viet Nam is rather constrained by the small lots and exposure to only one or two sides of the house. This is a good contemporary basis to start from because Vietnamese architects have perfected modernist architecture for houses.
© Oki Hiroyuki
This house is thus a modernist structure with an information-age face. Modernist rationality resulted in a simple reinforced-concrete structure with full-glass openings on the two four-storey end facades of the house. This accommodated the primary goal to take advantage of the indoor/outdoor living opportunities available in this tropical climate. Accordingly, the balconies on each floor are enlarged from the normal Vietnamese one meter rectilinear width to three meters on one end of the balconies to accommodate garden tables and chairs. This is accomplished by splaying the long sides of the balconies at angles to achieve the additional width.
© Oki Hiroyuki
This combination of splayed balcony edges on each floor, as well as the steel security screens, provides opportunities for an architecture beyond modernism. The angular edges of the balconies, with each floor set back a meter from the one below, compel the steel grid to cascade down the four-storey face of the house, warping as it goes. The warping exhibits amorphousness; the pattern of the steel cross-bars expresses randomness; and the layering of the screens against the balconies and light shelves display the dissonance of the information age. The complexity of the information age is thus expressed in a simple concept.
© Oki Hiroyuki
I will explain in a subsequent posting why I didn’t take these architectural photographs myself. All of the photographs posted here were produced by Oki Hiroyuki, the architectural photographer used often by the Vietnamese modernist architects that I respect.
© Oki Hiroyuki
© Oki Hiroyuki Vegetable roof garden
© Oki Hiroyuki
