TRAVERSING THE MONUMENTAL AND THE VERNACULAR
Museum for Vietnamese Art in Hanoi
Fall 2021 M.Arch thesis | Advisor: Mark Lee
The thesis is a critique of museum architecture in Hanoi, Vietnam, which serves its current function as politically propagandizing institutions instead of cultural ones. The proposal for a Museum for Vietnamese Modern and Contemporary Art speculates how vernacular architecture can negate political indoctrination to reclaim a public cultural amenity.
ONE. The Museum as a Political Tool
Vietnamese government’s political rhetoric concerning the past continues to be dominated by memories of national resistance and valor. Instead of displaying culture, the museums exist in Hanoi as political tools, and so their architecture becomes monuments of the government’s propaganda. From their massive scale, dressed in relentless colonnades, their axial, imposing façade to their hollow shrine-like, a cavernous interior that put on display relics of war, and remnants of revolution, the museum becomes what Sert, Leger, and Giedion's "Nine Points on Monumentality” called empty shells of political ideals - prime examples of banal nationalism.
The museums of Hanoi are not an expression of cultural needs.
TWO. The Monument and the City
On the urban level, whether they are plazas, temples, cathedrals, marketplace, or governmental institutions, the monuments are ever embedded in the urban fabric of Hanoi.
On the chosen site, the architecture of existing buildings ranges from a Brutalist socialist palace to a French colonial-style Police Museum, a political club in traditional Asian pagoda style, to an exhibition shed. These institutions, however, are surrounded by the vernacular fabric of the city, the monuments are constantly interacting with the architectural mass of the vernacular.
THREE. The Language of the Vernacular
The streetscapes of Vietnam's cities and towns are characterized by a specific building type – the tube house. Because of the long narrow geometry of the massing, these buildings’ section has always contained a proportioned juxtaposition of void and solid as a way of introducing lights, producing an ever complex and dynamic interior.
Whether there is a middle ground between the two? Will a cross-breeding between the monumental and the vernacular an answer to the architectural question of the museum?
FOUR. The Proposal
My proposal engulfs the existing monuments in its massing, whose grain is in the scale of the vernacular buildings. It fills up the plaza, hugging around the existing building, embedding them in its architectural mass. It is institutional program cross-dressing in vernacular architecture language. It camouflages its institution program in the scale of the residential context, in the language of the red brick and terra cotta screens. It seeks to cancel out the monumentality of the socialist palace by denying its façade and frontality.
The new museum inserts itself in the middle scale between the institution and the residence, an intermediary between the monumental and the vernacular.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J.L. Sert, F. Léger, S. Giedion. "Nine Point on Monumentality". 1943
Smith, C. S. 2021. "The Art Museum in Modern Times." Thames & Hudson. 2021
Phuong, Dinh Quoc, and Derham Groves. “The Aesthetics of Hanoi's Architecture: Sense of Place through the Eyes of Local Painters.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 69, no. 1, 2011, pp. 133–142. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42635844. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.
Taylor, Nora. “Orientialism/Occidentalism: The Founding of the Ecole Des Beaux-Arts D'Indochine and the Politics of Painting in Colonial Việt Nam, 1925-1945.” Crossroads: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, vol. 11, no. 2, 1997, pp. 1–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40860624. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.
Wee, Low Sze, and Patrick D. Flores, editors. Charting Thoughts: Essays on Art in Southeast Asia. National Gallery Singapore, 2017. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv13xpr6k. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.
Taylor, Nora Annesley. Painters in Hanoi: An Ethnography of Vietnamese Art. University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvvn595. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.
Von Hirschhausen, Ulrike. “International Architecture as a Tool of National Emancipation: Nguyen Cao Luyen in French Colonial Hanoi, 1920–1940.” The Hungarian Historical Review, vol. 7, no. 2, 2018, pp. 331–347. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26571603. Accessed 16 Feb. 2021.
Cooper, Nicola. “Urban Planning and Architecture in Colonial Indochina.” French Cultural Studies, vol. 11, no. 31, Feb. 2000, pp. 075–099, doi:10.1177/095715580001103105. Wim de Wit, “When Museums Were White: A study of the Museum as Building Type,” in Architecture for Art: American Art Museums, 1938–2008, ed. Scott J. Tilden
Hiroshi Sugimoto, “Museums of the Future: An Artist’s Perspective,” in Making a Museum in the 21st Century, ed. Melissa Chiu ed.
Brian O’Doherty, “Notes on the Gallery Space,” in Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, 13-34.
FEATURED ARTWORKS
Đặng Xuân Hòa. "Lúc Bỏ Thuốc (Time to Quit)". Oil on canvas. 2008
Tô Ngọc Vân. "Hai Thiếu Nữ và Em Bé (Two Ladies and Child)." Oil on canvas. 1944
Tô Ngọc Vân. "Vỡ Mộng" (Disillusionment)." Ink and gouache on sink. 1932
Bùi Xuân Phái. "Hà Nội Phố" (Hanoi Street). Oil on canvas. 1972
Đặng Xuân Hòa. "Trăng Đỏ 2 (Red Moon II)". Oil on canvas. 2008
Danh Võ. "We Are the People." Sculpture. 2010-2014
Nguyễn Gia Trí. "Dọc Mùng". Lacquered panels. 1939
Phạm Hậu. "Phong Cảnh Trung Du Bắc Bộ (Landscape in the Middle North Region)." Lacquered panels. 1940-1945
Phạm Hậu. "Cá Chép (Catfish)." 1939-1940
Mai Trung Thứ. "Chân Dung Cô Phương (The Portrait of Mamoiselle Phuong)." Oil on canvas. 1930