Vo Trong Nghia (Phú Thuy, Central Vietnam, 1976) is a leading figure in the contemporary Vietnamese architecture scene while also being a typical example of the country’s architects. He trained and worked in Japan for one decade, then moved back to Ho Chi Minh City and founded VTN Architects in 2006. Work by the practice looks to Vietnam’s architectural tradition to find strategies and materials that are useful to combat the degeneration of the country’s modern metropolises. To this end, VTN experiments with bamboo and inexpensive, easily available wood, using them on different scales for furniture, interiors and buildings.

At the Diamond Island Community Centre (2015) and Nocenco Café (2018) – both in Ho Chi Minh City – bamboo is structural in the weight-bearing domes. Bamboo is used structurally all throughout Castaway Island Resort (Lan Ha Bay, 2019), an interesting example of a reversible tourism complex “perched” on unblemished sands. One of VTN’s manifesto-like projects is the prototype for a low-cost house (3,000 euros for 20+ square metres), something the practice has been working on since 2012. Here, bamboo and polycarbonate panels make for lightweight, quickly mounted, semi-transparent infill for a metal frame.

The design of House for Trees (Ho Chi Minh City, 2014) inaugurates a second major line of exploration at VTN: single-family houses that radically reconsider the status of trees and incorporate them on a par with the human inhabitants. Stepping Park House (2018) and Ha House (2019) in Ho Chi Minh City, and Thang House in Danang City (2019) are three examples of contemporary tropical houses whose comfort is given by a positive relation to natural elements (greenery, sunlight and the breeze) instead of technological excess.

On a bigger scale, projects like FTP University (Hanoi, 2017), Viettel Offsite Studio (Thach That, Hanoi, 2017) and the Viettel Academy Education Centre (Thach That, Hanoi, 2019) show how VTN integrates architectural elements to implement all-round sustainability – ecological, economical and social – and compose coherently updated forms that are not placed on rhetorical display.