Vo Trong Nghia Architects – S-House 2

I've been in one of VTN's awarded house in Saigon. I've read quite a lot discussion of Vietnamese's architects around his works in general.

I agree with some comments that, VTN creative points in his designs (a very nice lighting solution for dining room, for example) comes at a quite high cost of other parts in the house. He pushes the stairway till the point of feeling suffocated so that he can have an innovatively beautiful corner somewhere in the living room.

He pays functionality for beauty, so you may admire his work on picture or if you visit the house once or twice but living there long enough, you'd start to be annoyed. Which makes me think it's not a good sacrifice.

I worked on building a school in Uganda. There our main issue was being able to afford the cement and corrugated roofing.

The bricks were made from baked clay and basic tools were the same as used in small agriculture. We took rocks from the ground and smashed them up to give us hardcore. Labour wasn't a problem as the entire community pitched in.

Prefabricated structures just weren't affordable at all. Taking free building materials from nature was key. The transport and cost of cement was our constraint.

This project uses a prefab structure, either on a prefab or poured slab foundation. That doesn't seem readily transportable by boat as they state.

Rather than just using local materials for finishing a better solution would surely be to come up with ways to use modern construction methods with locally sourced materials.

It's good to see architecture in the HN front page even if this is just another project.

There are hundreds (not exagerating) of interesting approaches but you can't see any of them prospering. Why? Being interesting is different from being an epiphany but specially because the lack of political backup. Architecture without politics will hardly ever change anything.