Architects, city planners, researchers and art historians brainstormed and envisioned the city’s new planning and renovation direction at an international architecture seminar themed "1,000 years of Thang Long-Ha Noi: Architecture Hallmarks Overtime" hosted by The Vietnam Architecture Association on October 2 in Hanoi.
The seminar aimed at exploring Hanoi’s rich and diverse architectural heritage and understanding its uniqueness as the city’s thriving and modernizing energy comes to life daily against a backdrop of ancient, colonial, neoclassic and contemporary architecture.
Attendees strived to unearth the key to the city’s current charm amidst all of its contradictions while critically looking at past planning mistakes or shortsightedness both during colonial rule and throughout more recent administrations.
Colonial authorities were particularly insolent and showed extreme disregard to the city’s architectural and cultural history which preceded them. They destroyed old citadels and relics in the center of Thang Long in the 19th century as they set on building a new administrative center.
Just as the city’s colonial administrative center was built on the foundations of Bao An ancient pagoda, Saint Joseph Cathedral was built on the foundations of Bao Thien Tower.
They also filled in the To Lich River and a series of lakes from the city’s north to the south to build a new urban center seriously offsetting the ecological balance and limiting the city’s natural drainage capacity.
More recent administrations, first faced by the tragedy of war then overwhelmed by the task of rebuilding the country, neglected some colonial architectural treasures between 1954s to the middle of 1980s causing them to suffer environmental degradation some of which irreversible.
Some colonial villas gave way to more practical infrastructure as the administration had to meet the needs a ten-fold increase of the urban population following the rural-urban exodus and a redesigned national landscape.
The new government also built a series of new uniformly-designed residential areas such as Kim Lien, Trung Tu, Giang Vo, Thanh Cong, Thanh Xuan, Nghia Do and Dong Xa which ultimately proved inconsistent with effective city planning and were considered esthetically unappealing.
A recent boom of plot-split front houses robbed the capital’s most charming streets of their character.
Skyrocketing real estate values began changing the very identities of communities in once more traditional neighborhoods as homes became financially prohibitory to many of their members.
Moreover, the construction boom the city is experiencing and the sprouting of high-rise apartment buildings is not only raising concerns for infrastructure overload, traffic jams, and increased flooding risks, but also causing Hanoi’s new urban landscape to resemble that of Seoul, Bejing and Singapore.
“In spite of historically detrimental policies and irresponsible decisions due to limited knowledge or unsustainable development practices, Hanoi is still beautiful”, Vietnam-born architect Nguyen Chi Tam, who was raised in Paris, said, as he returned to Vietnam to explore his origins.
He believes that Hanoi should follow an eco-friendly and esthetically conscious urban redevelopment path and architects should be involved in the urban planning process. Xenophilous tendencies which motivated some of Hanoi’s architectural decisions caused it to lose its soul. Tokyo’s architecture deprived of cultural identity should be a lesson learnt.
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