Harbin to Hanoi: Colonial Built Environment in Asia, 1840 to 1940

12. Domesticating the Suburbs: Architectural Production and Exchanges in Hanoi during the Late French Colonial Era

12 Domesticating the Suburbs Architectural Production and Exchanges in Hanoi during the Late French Colonial Era Danielle Labbé, Caroline Herbelin, and Quang-Vinh Dao Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communicating among themselves. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972, p. 30 The urban built environment of Hanoi, Vietnam, has been the object of much writing in recent years. This scholarship focuses on the colonizers ’ attempts to assert their domination over the territory and people of Indochina through the transformation and expansion of Hanoi’s urban space.1 Writers insist on the intentional destruction of pre-colonial administrative and religious artifacts (citadel, pagodas, temples, etc.) and their replacement by pompous civic buildings symbolizing the dominance of the French tutelary power. Authors also typically highlight the vast urban planning operations that led to the construction of residential neighborhoods south and west of Hanoi’s old merchant city. The broad avenues, flanked by luxurious villas, are presented as a device that entrenched the divide between the living space of the French and that of the indigenous populations. Altogether, these works tell the well-known story of spatial domination and division of colonial cities into visible and legible urban spaces under the firm control of the conquerors.2 What this scholarship tends to overlook is that by the late 1920s, architecture in Hanoi was no longer the sole purview of the colonizers. In the shadow of the colonial power, a group of native practitioners emerged out of the educational system set up by the French in Hanoi. Between 1926 and 1940, fifty or so Vietnamese professionals graduated from the Section d’Architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts d’Indochine (thereafter EBAI). Against the wish of the colonial administration, 252 Danielle Labbé, Caroline Herbelin, and Quang-Vinh Dao these young architects became increasingly active in shaping Hanoi’s built form, their work coming forth through active exchanges with French architectural production in Hanoi and abroad. Yet, Vietnamese architects only selectively engaged with Western techniques and styles, rooting their work in traditional practices of urban space. In this chapter, we recount the emergence of this group of young native professionals in the twilight of the French colonial era and explore their involvement in architectural developments in Hanoi.3 First, this article discusses the important role played by the EBAI in shaping their practice and interactions with a variety of architectural doctrines and movements. Second, it analyzes the case of the first urban renewal project led by the French municipal authorities that was intended for the local Vietnamese. It demonstrates how this project created specific conditions for EBAI graduates to get involved in the redefinition of housing in Hanoi. The third and last part describes the unique buildings that were co-produced by French and Vietnamese architects during this period of intense cultural exchanges. It argues that the rise of this first generation of Vietnamese architects is deeply connected to a mix of repressive and generative processes of collaboration and contestation between colonial rules and indigenous forms, uses, and representations of urban space. The EBAI: An Insurgent Vanguard of Cultural Exchanges The Architecture Section at the EBAI was created in 1926 with a precise purpose: to fill the gap in subordinate draughtsmen in the Indochinese governmental architecture services.4 After their graduation, the young men who entered the Architecture Section were expected to become technical assistants, working under the supervision of French professionals at the Service Central d’Architecture et d’Urbanisme d’Indochine, the Service des Bâtiments Civils d’Indochine or the Service des Travaux Publics, all of which employed a sizable number of French and Vietnamese civil servants.5 Despite these directives, the EBAI and its director, the painter Victor Tardieu, did not envisage the future of young Vietnamese architects as mere draughtsmen. Following the project elaborated by a group of French artists and intellectuals established in Hanoi since the late Domesticating the Suburbs 253 nineteenth century, Tardieu promoted the métissage of Western rationalist thinking with Eastern philosophy. He further encouraged the modernization of Vietnamese arts and its engagement with international artistic production. In taking the direction of the EBAI, Tardieu explained his intellectual and artistic vision: Would it not be necessary to establish an education that would be impregnated of the general principles that presided the construction...