[NOTE: This post goes out to my friend Jenny, who asked me about architecture in July 2013. Excitingly, it's a much more interesting topic than I assumed! So here's the first post!]
I find myself often looking down out my window, which is located on the 3rd (4th, American-style counting) floor of my house, and find myself succumbing to the question that must be difficult for any Vietnamese architect to resist: why isn't the entire lot filled... the entire vertical distance??
There's about half a meter of a small awning over the entrance to the garage... that would give me (or my poor roomies on the other side of the building, in their small, glass closet-rooms) just a liiiiiitle bit more breathing room.
But this is a form of thinking that I had never encountered as a designer. Form really SHOULD follow function, but it's difficult to resist the idea that an object's aesthetic should be at least equally important.
On one level, though, this extreme interpretation of Form v. Function just makes common sense - people are more important than the building, so stretch the building to the farthest corners of the available land, all the way up, and you'll have slightly more comfortable humans.Not to mention the fact that in the average Vietnamese home, there are many family members, and, all of a sudden, this doesn't just seem like A way to do it, it becomes THE way to do it. Even in parcels of city land that are surrounded by unsold/unimproved lots, the tube house reigns supreme... because the expectation is that this neighborhood will, in time, be just like every other well-developed neighborhood in the city - packed, walkable, vital, and very, very local.
