Hà Nội, mirror of Indochinese architecture
The architect Christian Pedalahore spent many of his childhood years in Việt Nam, to which he was remained very attached. He published an excellent article about Indochinese architecture in Hà Nội in Architecture Française Mardaga (Collection Villes, 1992). We provide below a condensed version, limiting the content to what could help the reader better understanding Hà Nội’s former French Quarter in the context of Indochinese architecture.
The beginnings: 1873-1900 from military to civil
In 1803, King Gia Long commissioned four French officers of
the engineer corps at his service to reconstruct the citadel in Vauban-style,
which had lost its status as royal capital to Huế.
In 1873, Francis Garnier dismantled the citadel which was only
to be restored the following year in exchange for an allotment endorsed by the
city of a land concession on the
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Beginning of the 20th century: |
Central Railway Station |
In 1882, Henri Rivière took over the citadel again. In 1883,
the armed resistance ordered the construction of a road joining the citadel and
the concession. Work was laid out for the cathedral, the first houses south of
the city and the clearing of
With the arrival of First Governor Paul Bert, responsibility
for the first large-scale construction projects that would change the face of
the city was taken on by the civil service, namely Public Works. The
development of an important thorough face going East-West (Paul Bert, formerly
Phố Hàng Khay) would give direction to the colonial quarter’s growth with an
extension towards the east on land gained from filled-in ponds between the lake
and
The years 1880-1890 witnessed the birth of a movement
tending towards a hybrid culture, crossing western rationalism and eastern
philosophy; a culture which is an architectural and urban domain foreshadows
the Indochinese school of the 1930s.
Throughout the course of the second stage of urban
development, stress was put on the construction of State buildings. They were no
longer to be randomly grouped in different neighborhoods, but built in specific
areas in order to give shape and harmony to the city.
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The Hà Nội Cathedral |
Working for a colonial regime attempting to assert its
power, Architect Auguste-Henri Vildieu renounced utilitarian rationalism of the
1880s calling on the massiveness and decorative vocabulary of neoclassical
architecture to capture the attention of the masses. Thus from 1892 to 1906, he
built the Officers’ Club, la Résidence Supérieure, the Post Office, the City
Hall (in the quarter designed by Paul Bert) and most notably from 1900
onward, his most grandiose works: the Palace of Justice (1900-1906) and the
Governor-General’s Palace (1901-1906). Colonial construction reached its peak
in 1907 with an outstanding project, Hà Nội’s Grand Exhibition Hall, a
neoclassical palace which will encumber the budget for more than ten years.
Erness Hébrard and local architecture: the 1920s
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A corner of the roof of the Theater in Hà Nội |
As an architect, Hébrard dedicated himself to three main
projects: le Musée de l’Ecole francaise d’Extrême-Orient in 1925, the
University in 1926 and the Bureau of Finances in 1931. Relying on his profound
knowledge of Chinese, Vietnamese and Khmer masterly architectures, he attempted
to prove the accuracy of his theories concerning the possibility of conveying
through his architecture the essence of local cultures without plagiarizing,
and of demonstrating a technical mastery of a specific environment. He sketched
the framework of a contextual architecture called the Indochinese style.
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It is interesting to note in passing the ambivalent attitude
which prevailed on the eve of the colonial exhibition in Paris: there was still
an unwavering awareness of the cultural and moral superiority of the
“privileged population” together with a certain respect, admittedly rigid, for
traditional cultures and the wish for colonized countries’ economic and
intellectual development (providing that it staged within the limits of its
tightly controlled dependence on the capital). This trend marked the challenge
for the colonized country of how much it could evolve and innovate within what
was determined or allowed by the colonizing country – despite the omnipresent
appeal from the colonizing country to traditional local architectural styles in
order to symbolize each colony’s cultural specificity.
L.G. Pineau and functional, contextual urban planning: 1930-1940
Arriving in Hà Nội in 1930, Pineau found himself
face-to-face with an urban planning that was more concerned with administration
than development. It was no longer a time of large-scale construction projects.
His efforts were concerned on the renovation of historical neighborhoods. He
worked with already existing structures and analysed every city block. He
defined a philosophy of contextual intervention which recognized a pertinence
if not functional, at least cultural, concerning the mercantile city and accepted
its fundamental heterogeneity.
Urban Planning in
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of this period in the colony. Over the period of twenty
years, we moved from a prioritized programmatic rationalization of commerce and
climatic conditions thus forming the symbolism of Hébrard’s masterly
architecture to the question of civilization and the preservation of
traditional lifestyles that concerned Pineau thereafter.
This political preoccupation, which gave architecture the
role of “socialist corrector”, dominated both
Modern architecture in Hà Nội: 1930-1945
Palace of Governor General (now the Government Guest House) |
Despite the relatively limited number of works carried out
in the Indochinese style begin by Hébrard at the end of the 1920s, it experienced
a resurgence among architects of Hà Nội. The most noteworthy, Arthur Kruze was
a professor than Director of Indochina’s