Introduction

Hanoi Aerial View (Source internet)

Importance and Impact

Hanoi’s urban landscape has been identified as a tremendous complexe palimpseste containing fundamental blueprints and records of the city’s evolution over thousands of years under turbulent political and social changes. Ad hoc architectures are the witnesses to social and political activities, informal ways of adapting with formal regulations.These intriguing chaos are considered as fundamental resources and subjects of study. Therefore, critical examinations, historical overviews and urban chronology are needed in order to enable us to decrypt Hanoi and its hidden urban artifacts that have durably influenced the relationship between people and the city.

The studies of city and urban areas in Vietnam for many years have the tendency to be top-down and in doing so they overlook numerous crucial ‘ad hoc’ aspects and situations of everyday lives. For this reason, organic urban conditions that arose from the city’s dwellers’ customs and spontaneous responses, are often devalued and deemed by the local authority and media as unorganised and undesired . Subsequent urban policies and plannings are set out to eliminate these conditions, unintentionally damaging urban fabric and fracturing local communities’ cultures. By setting up a research that focuses strongly on the combination of bottom-up and top-down point of view and combining a wide range of expertise from urban studies, anthropology, ethnography, and geography we hope to form a more holistic view on these urban conditions and contribute towards the policy-making process that directly influences the lives of urban dwellers in these conditions.

In addition, with Vietnamese cities going through waves of capitalistic urbanisation, many “Urban Artifacts” ( defined by architect and theorist Aldo Rossi as primary elements that contributed to the morphological and cultural evolution of the city) are quickly demolished to be replaced by generic mega malls and residential towers. The situations are daunting given the fact that many of these urban artifacts, especially those constructed in the 20th century, are currently undocumented and not considered as heritage. At this rate of urban development, they are at risk of being wiped out despite their significant places in history. The research aims to fill into this role of recording and archiving and, in doing so, raises public awareness towards these often forgotten artifacts.

Work division, Milestone and Outcomes

The research is structured into yearly themes, which will be investigated throughout the whole length of a typical year. Each main theme is discussed and chosen based on the urgency regarding the research subject matter and is encouraged to be overlapped with the core team members’ prior research experience.

For each themed research year, three primary activities are expected to take place: Multidisciplinary research, collective field-work and formal publication. Multidisciplinary research serves as a platform and interface on which data regarding the themed subjects, from existing literature, internet information to archived documents, is processed, curated and produced. This provides an opportunity for the teams to assess their off-site investigation, reflect on their progress and form research insight. This field work will culminate to a milestone symposium in which research teams present their progress and open a conversation with local scholars who are researching the same subject matter. The last and final activity will be the curation of all the information collected into a formal publication. The will serve as the last milestone that concludes a year of research.

After yearly themed investigations have concluded, publications of relevant subject matters are expected to be published. These publications will hopefully enrich Vietnamese urban studies literature and hopefully contribute to knowledge production and dissemination in Vietnam.

2021- Hanoi Ad Hoc 1.0 Architecture, Factories and (Re)Tracing the Modern Dream of Recent Past

2022 - Hanoi Ad Hoc 2.0 City’s Water ( The Red River and lakes)

2023 - Hanoi Ad Hoc 3.0 House-housing-household

2024 - Hanoi Ad Hoc 4.0 Urban villages and their gates

2025 - Hanoi Ad Hoc 5.0 Spirituality (pagoda, church, altar )

2026 - Hanoi Ad Hoc 6.0 Chasing the pavement, (sidewalk, public spaces)

2027 - Hanoi Ad Hoc 7.0 Monumental ( mega infrastructure, monumental architecture)

(© Hanoi Ad Hoc)(© Hanoi Ad Hoc)

Archive One of the needed conditions to establish Hanoi Ad hoc’s formwork is to collect the blueprint database of buildings of interest in order to reconstruct a digital platform. We attempt to explore forgotten modernism heritages and their mechanisms, “photographic survey”, and all archival documents related to the selected building (articles that talk abt it, old pictures of the building, sounds…)

(© Hanoi Ad Hoc)(© Hanoi Ad Hoc)

Theorize Hanoi Ad hoc is dedicated to open-ended acts of theorizing ,reevaluating urban ordinaries instead of finite descriptive works. This guideline will be critical and fundamental core values of the project. Hanoi Ad hoc seeks to comprehend Vietnamese Modernism and Modernity, its link with international historical events, the movement’s rise, fall, and its impacts on the contemporary Vietnamese urban scene. Understand the reciprocal relationship between different urban entities.( from social housing, factories to cultural palaces )

(© Hanoi Ad Hoc)

Provoke Unlike a conventional design project or an academic research. The project aims to bridge these two extremities by dynamic, experimental designs and creative theoretical interpretations. Its goal is not to give final answers but suggestions, provocations, and potential interventions, which could be interpreted under the form of urban folies, utopian or dystopian scenarios. As the results of a practice-led research program, the project’s outcome will take form under a series of annual publications that explores the evolving potential of urban banalities. It could serve as references for research-led architectural and urban practices.