A series of personal trajectories documenting one of the shorter periods of modernist architecture momentums. The final moments of built communist ideology in Vietnam.

The research focuses on the context and accomplishments of architectural practice during the period from 1968 to 1994 in Hanoi, Vietnam. This dense historical period includes drastic mutations for Vietnamese society, moving from the crisis of war through reconstruction, and further to an open-market economy. These developments directly influenced architectural education, training and production. Through a series of interviews, documentation sourcing, essays and graphic descriptions we illustrate how political, historical and personal narratives impacted the architectural culture of the time.

The current documentation on Modernist architecture in North Vietnam is still primitive and often composed of preliminary, un-systematic, and non-comprehensive inventories. This book will partially answer to the need for ordered documentation by gathering the stories of the main actors of that period, inventorying case studies on important projects, demystifying the competition process, and drawing a broad picture of the context. This will allow the reader to draw parallels between events in order to grasp a comprehensive portrait of that era. Furthermore, beyond Modernist Socialist Architecture, the study will potentially reveal the limits of an identity of North Vietnam Modernism Architecture.