
Vo Trong Nghia Architects – S-House 2 - ph0rque
http://votrongnghia.com/projects/s-house-2/
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linhchi
I've been in one of VTN's awarded house in Saigon. I've read quite a lot
discussion of Vietnamese's architects around his works in general.

I agree with some comments that, VTN creative points in his designs (a very
nice lighting solution for dining room, for example) comes at a quite high
cost of other parts in the house. He pushes the stairway till the point of
feeling suffocated so that he can have an innovatively beautiful corner
somewhere in the living room.

He pays functionality for beauty, so you may admire his work on picture or if
you visit the house once or twice but living there long enough, you'd start to
be annoyed. Which makes me think it's not a good sacrifice.

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drsim
I worked on building a school in Uganda. There our main issue was being able
to afford the cement and corrugated roofing.

The bricks were made from baked clay and basic tools were the same as used in
small agriculture. We took rocks from the ground and smashed them up to give
us hardcore. Labour wasn't a problem as the entire community pitched in.

Prefabricated structures just weren't affordable at all. Taking free building
materials from nature was key. The transport and cost of cement was our
constraint.

This project uses a prefab structure, either on a prefab or poured slab
foundation. That doesn't seem readily transportable by boat as they state.

Rather than just using local materials for finishing a better solution would
surely be to come up with ways to use modern construction methods with locally
sourced materials.

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galfarragem
It's good to see architecture in the HN front page even if this is _just
another project_.

There are _hundreds_ (not exagerating) of interesting approaches but you can't
see any of them prospering. Why? Being interesting is different from being an
epiphany but specially because the lack of political backup. Architecture
without politics will hardly ever change anything.

