Architecture of Happiness The Work of Hoang Thuc Hao

Abstract

Hoang Thuc Hao’s projects, particularly the community buildings, ask what it means to be in Vietnam, what the transformative growth of recent years has meant to everyday lives. He is preoccupied with climatic response, local craft and materials, relationship between indoor and outdoor. He too seeks meaning, combining old and new, albeit not in the city but in rural Vietnam. Embedded within Hao’s reading of the zeitgeist, there is a position on the environment. Hao offers an implicit nod to the sustainability movement that has mushroomed in Vietnam since the 2010s. However, his worldview is rooted in the phenomenological, which contrasts with other green architects who rely mostly on technological solutions.