Trang Le

from

The SELF-ADJUSTING City to

SÀ I-GÒN / HỒ CHÍ MINH CIT Y A NEW V ISION for UR BA NISM A Master of Architecture Thesis by Trang Le

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Abstract _ A N INTRODUCTION

Hồ Chí Minh City, otherwise known as Sài-gòn, like many thriving cities in the East, possesses an intriguing character of duality – an identity straddling opposing forces.

The city is both a physical place and a collective consciousness, whose memories are simultaneously written and re-written over by convoluted acts of construction and destruction. This condition of duality is the core theme of exploration in this thesis, with the intent to reveal the underlying forces at play in a city’s nuanced process of selfadjusting.

Perhaps one of the most controversial icons of Vietnam’s modern era, the Tân Sơn Nhất Airport holds many different memories and meanings to the people of Vietnam— repression and resistance, exploitation and subversion, or civility and dispossession.

The airport has always been in tension, between the thrive for modernization and a global city, against the right to the city for its people. The news about the Tân Sơn Nhất airport expansion and the scandal around the misuse of airport/government land started the interest for this thesis in finding out what exactly is built there, who is occupying that area day-to-day, and how they use the space. Around the airport the boundary between authority and free will may seem more apparent, yet it speaks to the condition of duality of the city.

The self-adjusting architecture proposes the translation of the dynamically temporal nature of movements, actions and interactions of the everyday life into a physical construct that can adjust itself to meet any needs of its user-occupier, while capturing its own course of transformation and re-absorbing the produced form and sociocultural implications to evolve. The result is a structure-network that perform in time and space on the physical site of the city, while oscillating the role of the person as the user, spectator, and actor of architecture. _

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_ DI S TA N T PA S T or FU T U R E FOR ETOLD?

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Sài gòn

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The southerners’ roots

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One city, two realities . . .

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. . . an ever-evolving vernacular

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Hồ Chí Minh City _ ENERGY of THE NEW GLOBA L

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Recurrence: towers in the park

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. . . and the colonial garden villas

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A cycle: luxury and dispossession

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Tân Sơn Nhất

_ DUA LIT Y of POW ER

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power_

pride_

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dispossession_

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Building from Duality _TH E A IR PORT and EV ERY DAY LIFE

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Tension: airport vs. city

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Consider: the everyday life

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the roof: claiming one’s air rights

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the front room: interstitial space

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the alley / street: public space

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everything: negotiable space

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Self-Adjusting City _ A NEW V ISION for UR BA NISM

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1 active street 2 rootop recreation 3 elevated gathering place 4 multi-generation

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5 photovoltaic panels 6 community-scale waste incinerator 7 turbine electricity generator 8 flue-gas treatment

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9 energy-generating, elevated taxi-lanes 10 crop fields and greenhouse in between 11 community crop production 12 farmer's housing and rest point

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