The fustigations of a French architect in Vietnam.
It’s not so fanciful to view architecture as a kind of language, a system which forms the structures in which people live their lives, a mediation between idea and object. Like language, architecture reflects hierarchies and expresses power dynamics.
Buildings are not just buildings, after all. They are signs and symbols. They can communicate wealth, status, refinement, devotion. They can express internationalism or nationalism, modernity or archaism, individualism or collectivism. Like language, architecture has registers, vernaculars and dialects. When these cross borders they are either translated – with architects playing the role of translators – or, in an act of cultural hegemony, they are not.
But sometimes architects use language more classically as well, the words on a page variety. They turn to writing and become, or imagine themselves to become, the poet-philosophers of the built environment (or at least the singer-songwriters). Non-architects might think architects are purely visual in their approach to the world. Not so. Architects love words, too.
Olivier Souquet is a French architect working in Vietnam, founder of a Paris firm which has set up a Vietnamese branch known as De-So Asia in 2016 with a view to expanding its footprint from Europe into Vietnam and Southeast Asia. A video on their website describes the trajectory, complete with lingering shots of schools, museums – and other buildings whose uses are not immediately identifiable, but which resonate with a certain restrained elegance. Their project list is very broad: from a memorial for the mother of Ho Chi Minh, to university buildings, eco-lodges and two beautiful lakeside pavilions.
In Chroniques d’architecture, a French language website and newsletter about architecture and the built environment, Souquet writes his own Chroniques du Mékong, charting his personal experiences in Vietnam, in a rather eclectic style, and rather colourful language. In his most recent article he veers from observation to critique to manifesto….
Contrast is everywhere. In wealthy Europe, Souquet writes, “pernicious pessimism” is order of the day. In Asia, “unbridled insouciance stirs the creatives”. Yet architects in Vietnam don’t wear the “halo of the artist” which they do in France. Here, he observes, you are just one link in the chain from client to finished building, and clients often decide on pretty much everything.
Having survived a thousand years of Chinese occupation, a century of the French, and ten of the Americans – who didn’t leave much apart from “napalm soaked into the soil”, Souquet notes – there is resilience and determination in Vietnam. Money matters. “Capitalo-communist Confucianism” is all the rage, Souquet writes: “the mandarins have been replaced by the bankers; power is held by financiers and their children”.
It would appear that being a French architect in Vietnam, raised in their profession a rather different way, isn’t easy: “you are confronted by your American, British, German and Korean colleagues and you quickly realise that your romantic notions of the Parisian beaux arts won’t help you, and that you are alone against big international firms who might as well be selling fluorescent toothpaste as much as architecture”. Your culture of intellectual self-doubt faces the “steamroller of Anglo-Saxon certainties”.
The Americans produce the best Power Points, Souquet writes, noting that Skidmore, Owings and Merill have just won a competition to develop the last natural meander in the Saigon River in Ho Chi Minh City. But it’s not just their skill with presentations that Souquet credits with the success of the big American firms. American pension funds are said to play a role. And politics too. For two years after Trump’s 2019 visit to Vietnam, Souquet writes that his firm got no official commissions at all. The authorities, he writes, were going all out to give priority to American firms: “it was golf courses and supermarkets all across the country”.
While expressing his pride in being French, he sees ambient French (and European) culture as having bred a certain risk averseness amongst architects, an unwillingness to sell themselves, an acceptance of regression. “Architects”, Souquet writes, “are like pH test strips: they react immediately to their context”. Saigon is full of change; Paris is being encased in solid glass – vitrified is the word he uses.
“Asia is constantly modifying itself in a desire for permanent change; France is petrifying itself in a state of anoxic anticipation. I live between two worlds which ignore each other and whose different preoccupations preclude mutual comprehension. One is still trying to give lessons [to the rest of the world], the other dreams of consumption. One is full of discouragement; the other is full of desire”.
All this has consequences.
At home, French architects are becoming form-fillers rather than true creatives, Souquet writes. This must be resisted.
In the international context, they have to do two things. They must not lose sight of the value of what it is to be specifically a French architect: “an architect is someone who reasons, who questions”. Constantly correcting, doubting, refining is in our DNA, Souquet confirms with panache: “a very great French strength in the international field”. Yet they must also be a savvy assessor of the place in which they are working and the materials they are working with.
They must, in a sense, strive for alchemy.
Like translators, perhaps.
The original article, by Olivier Souquet in French, ‘D’un continent à l’autre, l’architecte avec ou sans doute’, published in Chroniques d’Architecture and available here.
Olivier Souquet is a French architect working in Vietnam, and the co-founder and chairman of De-So Asia.
Chroniques d’Architecture is a French language publication on architecture and the built environment. Its strapline in its media kit reads: “Être là où sont les architectes” or in English: “Be where the architects are”.
