Repurposing the Architectural Language of the Cold War

This student workshop takes place in the city of Hanoi, Vietnam, focusing on the khu tập thể collective housing estates (KTT), produced between 1954 and 1985 in the context of global circulations of socialist modernization. The narrative of socialist housing as an artifact of the Cold War often mirrors the narrative of socialism’s rise and fall, a utopian dream overtaken by the realities of social failures, decay, and obsolescence. Yet across the ‘brother countries’, this architecture faces an apparent contradiction between its symbolism through the image of heroic, monolithic form, and its afterlife as inhabited and transformed by people over the past decades. This workshop explores how adaptation and complexity manifest through built, social, and affective space. Invited speakers offered public lectures about relevant subjects of research and artistic production. In parallel, students tested techniques of observation, drawing, and storytelling to uncover and document narratives of change sited within socialist-era mass housing today.

More documentation of the workshop can be found here.

Hanoi Ad Hoc is a multiannual, interdisciplinary research framework and design programme. Initiated by architect Mai Hung Trung and joined by partners professor/anthropologist Christina Schwenkel, architect Duc Le, and designer/researcher Ylan Vo. The project’s name refers to its main purpose of focusing on the insight of tailored urban makings, and dealing specifically with contemporary urban issues of Hanoi. This design-oriented research hereby provocatively reconfigures the contemporary vision about forgotten parts of Vietnamese modernism architecture, and sheds light on everyday urban banalities.

hanoiadhoc.com

Khu Tập Thể (2023–24)

The narrative of socialist housing as an artifact of the Cold War often mirrors the narrative of socialism’s rise and fall, a utopian dream overtaken by the realities of social failures, decay, and obsolescence. Yet across the ‘brother countries’, this architecture faces an apparent contradiction between its symbolism through the image of heroic, monolithic form, and its afterlife as inhabited and transformed by people over the past decades.

Khu Tập Thể (2023–24), documentary, English, 8’ 36” 
By: Hanoi Ad Hoc
Written and Directed by: Trung Mai
Editor: Marilyn Pham Dacusin
Sound Designer: Hoang Thuy
Camera Operators: Nguyen Thien An, Marilyn Pham Dacusin
Proofread by: Lauren Lu
Voice Over: Ylan K Vo
Production Assistants: Phung Huy Viet, Hoang Ngan Ha
Supported by: Goethe-Institut, Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)