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What is “French Style”? Questioning genealogies of “western looking” buildings in Vietnam

Qu'est-ce que le « style français » ? Questionnement des généalogies des bâtiments à « l'aspect occidental » au Vietnam
Caroline Herbelin

Testo integrale

I wish to thank Tania Sengupta and Stuart King for their insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper presented at the conference “Dissonant architectural heritage in the postcolonial age. On the changing perceptions of 'colonial' architecture in recent decades,” Lisbon, 18–20 February 2013. Their suggestions are very useful for developing further the first hypothesis presented here.

1“It is such a pity that those awful architectural cake-houses spread in Hanoi like mushrooms, while colonial buildings are destroyed.” I often heard this reflection expressed in different ways while I was doing field research for my dissertation on architectural exchange in Vietnam during the colonial period. Houses in the “New French Style” (fig. 1 and 2), a kitschy patchwork of unidentified architectural styles that mixed neoclassical, Haussmanian, and regional styles were subject to sharp criticism by foreign tourists and expatriates along with Vietnamese intellectuals and especially architects. I was inclined to share this point of view, trying myself to differentiate the unauthentic copies from the “true” colonial buildings that would compose my corpus. I noticed, however, a definite aesthetic similarity between this New French Style and the constructions built by certain rich Vietnamese during colonial times: they shared a certain sense of exuberance, the capacity to mix very different styles, and the use of several common patterns. Furthermore, the current critiques of the New French Style houses are formulated in almost the same way as during the colonial era. Considering these new buildings, and even more talking with their inhabitants, steered my reflections in unexpected ways that would have been much more unlikely if I had simply considered the archives. This realization led me to undertake postdoctoral study on architectural borrowings. Although my work is at its beginning, and was started out of simple curiosity, I would like to share some of my initial conclusions.

Figure 1: House in the “New French Style” near Hanoi, 2008.

Figure 1: House in the “New French Style” near Hanoi, 2008.

Figure 2: House in the “New French Style” near Hanoi, 2008.

Figure 2: House in the “New French Style” near Hanoi, 2008.

2The main benefit of this study is to help me reconsider colonial heritage in Vietnamese architecture, which has broader theoretical implications as well. The critics of the “New French Style,” especially Vietnamese architects, assume that the dissonance of these styles came from a poor understanding of French colonial architecture. Yet, the idea of bad assimilation of the colonial style by the nouveau riche bourgeoisie became less tenable in the light of the conversations I had with those houses’ inhabitants. Their residences seem to deal less with colonial architecture and more with a certain wish to be cosmopolitan. The different perceptions of this “New French Style” reveal diverse social strategies of distinction that cause this architecture to be judged as modern by some and in terrible taste by others. Viewed through this lens, the twenty rather informal interviews carried out alongside my doctoral thesis helped me understand the social processes at stake in architecture of the colonial period and surrounding hybrid architecture. The parallel between past and present encouraged me to reconsider more broadly the question of western influences in Vietnamese architecture in the 19th and 20th centuries and how the colonial filter is not always relevant to considering phenomena taking place during colonial times.

The “New French Style”

  • 1 Compartments or shophouses is a built form, which can be found all over Southeast Asia with local (...)

3The development of the “New French Style” corresponded to the opening up of the country after Đi Mi in 1986, which was the Vietnamese equivalent of Soviet Perestroika. In other words, the country opened up to the market economy. In this way during the 1990s and above all in the 2000s with the economic take-off, there was a sprouting up, above all in the north of the country, of brightly colored compartments, also called shophouses.1 Each building was taller than the next and each flaunted, in a manner that was perhaps more exuberant than their colonial ancestors, motifs borrowed from the Western neo-classical styles but also at times those referring to elements of French regional style.

  • 2 See Tạp Chí Kiến Trúc editorial board, “Về hợi chứng quay trở lại caí gọi là 'kiến trúc pháp'” [“ (...)
  • 3 For example a presentation was delivered at the Hanoi school of architecture on this topic in July (...)

4This architecture, a sign of the growing prosperity of a certain social class, was not, however, to everyone’s taste: tourists and expatriates consider them inauthentic and garish, but the most developed and interesting criticism comes from Vietnamese architects. My architect friends, often attached to colonial-era architecture, explained to me the irony that the new house builders had destroyed authentic French buildings in order to reconstruct so-called Western-style buildings by using French “motifs” in a muddleheaded way. The subject of a passionate debate, this topic gave rise to several articles in specialized journals,2 and even to conferences in architectural schools.3 In a didactic manner, these architectural professionals explained that what they baptized “the New French Style” didn’t correspond to anything and that it was nothing but a badly made copy of the former colonial style. They also criticized this style as a sign of the commercialization and standardization of architecture that attempted to be enticing and was without originality. The ubiquity of this style was for them a veritable plague that stifled the creativity of Vietnamese architecture and put it in peril.

5By using the term “New French Style,” these architects clearly established a link between the colonial period and the present. Indeed, it was not rare to find parts of colonial buildings exactly reproduced on certain houses. In this way, for example, one can see elements from the emblematic roof of the Municipal Theater, inaugurated in 1910, in numerous houses (fig. 3). My architect friends explained to me how certain clients came to see them with photographs of elements taken from colonial houses in Hanoi and asked them to integrate these elements in their plans. Finally, during a visit to a forge that produces metal gates and balconies, one craftsman indicated to me that the majority of the clients asked him to reproduce the motifs that they had noticed on this or that old colonial house.

Figure 3: Example of an house with elements inspired by the Municipal Theater built in 1910 by the French, Hanoi, 2008.

Figure 3: Example of an house with elements inspired by the Municipal Theater built in 1910 by the French, Hanoi, 2008.
  • 4 Hoai Anh Tran, Another Modernism?: Form, Content and Meaning of the New Housing Architecture of Ha (...)

6Initially triggered by mere curiosity, I began to explore the processes hidden behind this “New French Style,” and in particular the question of its reception as a side project of my doctoral research. What did the use of these Western motifs mean for the owners of these houses? Was it really for them a reference to the colonial, an aesthetic nostalgia? I thus started in 2008 a series of rather informal interviews. Hoping to have a rather large sample, I moved forward in two ways, noting first of all the houses that seemed to me to belong to this style and then meeting with their inhabitants. On other occasions, I was introduced to people whose houses my intermediaries judged to have, in one way or another, a French or a colonial element. I also relied on the groundbreaking work of Tran Hoai Anh in which she narrates the history of owners of houses in Hanoi in the late 1990’s and analyzes what the concept of “modernity” means to them.4 Without entering into the details of an investigation that is still very much a work-in-progress, I discuss briefly below the directions that I consider promising.

7Through these twenty or so interviews, it became clear that the category of “New French Style” was not employed by the inhabitants of these houses at all. Of course, during my inquiry, I avoided mentioning the terms “French” and “colonial” so as to let the owners describe their houses in their own terms. I observed in this way that references to colonial and French buildings never once cropped up. By contrast, I found these terms mentioned right away during my visits to the inhabitants of old colonial houses. The owners were proud of the ancient character of their house, and often praised the quality of French construction. No trace of this type of discourse, however, could be found among those whose recent houses display motifs comparable to colonial houses. For the owners the decorative references to the West, rather than a return to the colonial, mainly signified three things:

1. Modernity: This was the concept that appeared most often in the interviews. It was especially the case when the owner had himself organized the construction of his house. It is necessary to remember that in Vietnam the construction of a house is a very important process that gives rise to extensive family discussion. The buyer intervenes very precisely at all stages of construction and particularly in what concerns the decor. For these owners, their house is above all a modern house, and the decorative references to Western styles serve as a testimony of this. This or that element reused from a colonial house in reality is nothing more than one reference among others, as many are inspired equally by photographs in magazines, often available at the construction companies, without the origin of these styles being a real concern.

2. A guarantee of a certain standard of quality: this is an argument that was often found when the owners bought their houses in high-class conglomerates, of the “gated community” type, that offer dozens of identical houses. The reference to western architecture appeared in this case to be really secondary to the inhabitants. Certain people who I interviewed did not even seem to really understand the meaning of my questions or why I was so persistent in trying to comprehend what they thought of the decor of their house. They appreciated its stylistic features but these did not appear to mean anything in particular for them. They insisted on the fact that “all was already like that” when they arrived. However, one cannot discount the impact of advertisements for such houses or luxury conglomerates in which reference is made to France, mentioning explicitly Paris, Versailles or Louis XIV as part of the sales pitch.5 The French reference is in this way used as a trademark and a guarantee of a standard and a certain level of quality for the client.

  • 6 Heinz Schütte, “Aspects architecturaux de la transformation de Hà Nội après le Đổi Mới (1986): con (...)

3. Cosmopolitanism: in certain cases, the reference to European architectural elements is linked to the owner’s journeys. This could take very diverse forms, the visibility of which was more or less deliberate. In this way, the widow of a very highly placed functionary, coming from an influential family in Hanoi, cared that her house was constructed by a Vietnamese architect living in France. She strongly insisted on the fact that she had many friends in the West and that she knew European arts and culture very well, but when I asked her what was Western in her house, she snapped back that it was completely Vietnamese, which was not at all apparent in the initial view, notably in the disposition of space that I found unusual for a Vietnamese house. Opposed to this discrete cosmopolitanism of forms, Heinz Schütte6 has presented the case of a Vietnamese businessman, trained and employed in East Germany, who built the house of his dreams following a trip to Europe. His house is thus conceived as a replica of the Invalides but also incorporates elements from the chateau of Versailles and the castle of Karlsruhe. These references are for him a way of proudly displaying his cosmopolitan life journey.

8Thus, very different (but not always contradictory) motivations have driven the people I interviewed to build or live in houses with aesthetic elements of Western appearance. To push the argument further, we can say that the common point of these motivations is not a quotation of French colonial style, but precisely the quasi-absence of reference to it: whenever it is referred to, the allusion is very limited.

  • 7 This term is used in the way Arjun Appadurai uses it about culture and material culture: Arjun App (...)

9What is interesting is that this “vernacular cosmopolitanism”7 (that is to say the ability to take external elements and combine them with vernacular ones in a specific way with no other equivalent elsewhere) can be interpreted in two ways depending on which social group is looked at. To understand this we must add to the list of examples we described above, a new trend among the Vietnamese elite to build second homes in the countryside similar to traditional wooden Vietnamese houses. These constructions often use a traditional structure, and they look ancient, but inside they are equipped with all modern facilities. For instance the one that I had the chance to visit in North Vietnam (fig. 4) had an ancient looking first floor, but thanks to the slope of the land, also had a semi-buried basement with additional bedrooms and bathrooms, which obviously did not exist in ancient models.

Figure 4: New house built in the "traditional" style, in Xuan Mai, Hanoi province, 2008.

Figure 4: New house built in the "traditional" style, in Xuan Mai, Hanoi province, 2008.
  • 8 See for example the Ciputra complex in Hanoi named after a rich Indonesian businessman who is the (...)

10In the light of this example and those presented above, we can better understand how this vernacular cosmopolitanism can be interpreted in terms of the concepts of low and high culture and class. On the one hand, the Vietnamese educated elite coming most of the time from a very old elite family background, often very well travelled if not educated abroad, advocates a return to traditions in their homes, thereby claiming precise knowledge of the ancient canons of architecture, be they colonial or traditional. That is to say, they position themselves socially thanks to a certain cultural capital they possess. On the other hand, lower classes or the nouveau riche use Western looking elements in their houses as a way to demonstrate a certain economical capital and to assert their own taste. What appears most strongly in the interviews I conducted is the desire to affirm one’s own identity and to distinguish oneself from one’s neighbor. This, in turn, creates a “fashionable trend” leading to some kind of “collective individualization”: the same general aesthetic codes become very popular but the profusion of design combinations available allows each individual to express his own identity. From this point of view, the reference to colonial architecture is only one element among many others and it can’t be considered without raising the question of the importance of the influences of Asian neighbors on Vietnam in the dissemination of modern architecture and Western looking motives as we know that many of the luxury complexes using European architectural references are in fact Korean, Indonesian,8 or Taiwanese initiated housing projects.

Colonial Influences and Regional Circulations

  • 9 See An Định, Hué’s Hidden Pearl, published online by the German Conservation and Education project (...)
  • 10 Michèle Pirrazzoli-T'Serstevens, “The Emperor Qianlong's European Palaces,” Orientations, vol. 19, (...)

11This de-centering of the “colonial” influence in contemporary architecture in Vietnam, I want to argue here, also invites us to reconsider in a fresh way certain phenomena that we thought we knew about the colonial period. Such as, for example, the Hue palace An Định built by emperor Tự Đức (1829–1883) between 1916 and 1918 was immediately identified as a copy of Versailles9 and the emperor presented the subject as inspired by French architecture. But, if we pay attention to regional circulations, we cannot avoid questioning how much influence on Tự Đức’s palace came from the Chinese palace of Yuan Ming Yuan, a building itself inspired by European palaces.10 The Baroque motifs mixed with an Asian touch seemed to be much closer to the style of the Yuan Ming Yuan than to any French building in the colony at that time.

  • 11 For more information on Wang Tai see Claudine Salmon’s commentary on the text of Tan Keong Sum, “R (...)

12Beyond this well know example of the An Định palace, considering Asian circulation rather than East-West transfers sheds lights in a new way on the origins of western motifs in Vietnam during the 19th and 20th centuries. Various accounts of the initial period of French conquest, from the 1860s to the 1880s, mention an immense three-story house, gigantic with large verandas. The house was very imposing—in fact, it resembled a large building more than a house—and it represented such a landmark in the town at the time that a traveler did not hesitate to say that it was the true center of the town. This house that sheltered the state monopolies had been previously the Union Club and before that, at the end of the 1860s, the first town hall, the same one that made people say that the mayor was the best-housed government official in Saigon. Yet it was not any of its functions that gave it its name. On all of the pages it was referred to by the name of “Wang Tai House” or very often the “famous Wang Tai house.”11

13This house, the descriptions of which implied that it had nothing Asian about it, had not been constructed by the French but by a rich Chinese, Wang Tai with the complete name of Zhang Hongtai or Zhang Peilon. This figure of Saigon’s budding colonial society was important because he was the opium tax farmer in Cochinchina and in Cambodia. But what is of more specific interest here is that he was an entrepreneur and that he was responsible for the majority of the constructions of the town of Saigon, at least at the beginning of the conquest. If his most well-known projects were the colonial Treasure or, perhaps more significantly still, the Cathedral, he was above all responsible for having built entire areas of houses designed to house locals. These sites were composed of the very long brick houses mentioned above, called “compartments” or “shophouses”. Their form was present before the colonial period but until then they were largely built in perishable material and had been destroyed for the most part during a fire. Witnesses recalled that Wang Tai with Ban Ap, another Chinese entrepreneur, shared almost all of the construction market until the 1880s, while Vietnamese and French buildings remained extremely rare.

  • 12 Towkay, that is to say a Malaysian-Chinese business owner.
  • 13 See Julian Davison (text) and Luca Invernizzi Tettoni, Singapore Shophouse, Singapore: Talisman Pu (...)
  • 14 See Khoo Joo Ee, The Straits Chinese, a Cultural History, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur: The Pepin Pr (...)

14As Wang Tai and Ban Ap were originally from Singapore, they thus belonged to the Chinese merchant diaspora in Southeast Asia and in this way, were attached less to the culture of continental China than to the very individual culture of the Sino-Malay community. Notably, the architecture of this community was specific, and gave rise to a particular style known under various names: “Straits Eclectic,” “Sino-Malay-Colonial,” “Sino-Malay-Palladian,” “Tropical Renaissance,” “Towkay12 Italianate,” “Chinese Palladian,” or even “Chinese Baroque.”13 The multitude of these names, besides the flexible character and lack of definition of this style, highlights above all its profoundly syncretic style. One of its principal characteristics was to integrate elements of classical styles from European architectural history. Although this style reached its greatest level of development during the colonial period in Singapore, it would be wrong to attribute its origins to the English presence. It was in reality a syncretism, traces of which date back at least to the 15th century, when Chinese merchants established themselves in Insulindia (current Indonesia and Malaysia) and married local women. These merchants were in close contact with Dutch and English merchants of the voc and the eic respectively and came to adopt certain cultural traits of these groups.14

  • 15 See Caroline Herbelin, Architecture et urbanisme en situation coloniale, le cas du Vietnam, PhD di (...)
  • 16 Headquarters of the government services for the northern region of Indochina.

15Thus the decors of acanthus leaves, fluted pilasters and friezes that flourished at the end of the 19th century on the compartments of Hanoi and Saigon form part of a long chain of mixing and of circulations and cannot be viewed as the simple transposition of French colonial buildings. Moreover certain European observers of the time, those who had often traveled the most, were not mistaken when they criticized the “compradore” style of these Vietnamese houses.15 By using the term “compradore” that designates the Chinese merchants who dealt with the Westerners in the treaty ports, such connections were considered at the time more Chinese than colonial in nature. Of course, certain elements were undeniably inspired directly by French colonial architecture that was being built because of colonization. For example, there was a bull’s eye and a Mansard roof that recalled the Résidence supérieure16 in Tonkin, and that could not be found in Singapore. Moreover, it is necessary to understand that this reference to local French architecture is characteristic of architectural genetics that is much older and the principle of which was the malleability and the capacity to integrate new elements.

16Thus it would be an error to think, as certain French observers of the period did, that the style of compartments in Indochina whose rather abundant decorations could shock the unaccustomed eye, had been a sort of “failed” attempt at adapting French architecture, and that this failure was due to the fact that locals, for a lack of technical mastery, did not know how to reproduce it.

17As such, the case of the Sino-Malay path allows for the consideration of the questions of transfers and utilization of Western decorative elements from a new perspective. In effect, rather than being a mere influence expressing a unilateral transfer in a straightforward way, a confrontation, and consequently the domination of one homogenous cultural bloc over another, the above example suggests on the contrary that historians can benefit greatly from analyzing such borrowings within a framework of a reticulated network and in unraveling possible, complex circulations. This is not to deny all responsibility of the colonial situation in the utilization of Western motifs, as indeed some in effect stemmed directly from French architecture. Rather, I would like to argue here that above all French colonization created the conditions permitting such complex circulations and flows. In a very concrete manner for example, colonization abolished the sumptuary laws that regulated all construction and that made all architectural decorations not only codified but reserved more and more for the high ranking government officials, which helps to explain the emergence of a very plain architectural style. Colonization acted therefore like a releasing element, like a vector, but not like a unique performative element of a syncretic style whose regional roots were well established.

Conclusion

  • 17 Jean-François Bayart and Romain Bertrand, “De quel 'legs colonial' parle-t-on ?,” Esprit, December (...)
  • 18 Paul Veyne, Quand notre monde est devenu chrétien (312-394), Paris: Albin Michel, 2007, p. 265–266(...)

18Some historians17 have recently criticized postcolonial studies for systematically interpreting current phenomena through the lens of the colonial past. Instead these historians plea for an approach that historicizes and checks the reality of a supposedly colonial origin for each phenomenon considered. The case studies that we have considered here show the relevance of adopting this kind of approach in the history of architecture. The examples used demonstrate that we are not witnessing a simple translation from West to East, nor from past to present which would easily explain the Western appearance of architectural borrowings. In other words, Western influences are not, either currently or during the colonial era, the exclusive result of a continuous development that took roots with the start of French domination. These syncretic buildings, some of which we have discussed here, are the result of an epigenesis in the sense used by the historian Paul Veyne.18 This is to say, the result of multiple interactions, which modify each other as they interact, rather than of a diffuse influence coming from a single source.

19French colonization has without doubt broadly transformed the built environment in Vietnam. Yet the attention to a precise detail—here the use of Western looking decorative elements—demonstrates that the colonial lens does not allow for the explanation of all the phenomena at work during the French period. The same is true for the lens of East and West during the era of globalization today as we have seen in the first part of this article: the thread of the colonial influence should not be broken, but it is only one possible thread in a whole cloth. This example of the so-called “New French Style” shows us that situating the colonial influence in a more complex setting of modes of diffusion is also meaningful in the context of these borrowings: one could presuppose a filiation that appears quite evident but that has been shown not to be relevant to the question of “identity” for those who use them. In the case presented, the return to colonial buildings that is meaningful for a certain elite is not really significant for the owners as it is inscribed in a larger system of references.

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Note

1 Compartments or shophouses is a built form, which can be found all over Southeast Asia with local adaptations. These houses characterized by a very narrow façade (5–6 meters on average) and their depth, which can easily reach more than twenty-five meters at least. They are sometimes also called Chinese shophouses as this built form was diffused by the Chinese diaspora, although it is now believed that the origin of the shophouse is not Chinese per se, but is the result of an interaction between Dutch and Chinese architectural forms which occurred in Insulindia and which can be traced back at least to the 18th century. On the origin of shophouses in Southeast Asia see Alain Viaro, “Le compartiment chinois est-il chinois ?,” Les Cahiers de la recherche architecturale, no. 27–28, 1992, Architectures et cultures, p. 139–150.

2 See Tạp Chí Kiến Trúc editorial board, “Về hợi chứng quay trở lại caí gọi là 'kiến trúc pháp'” [“The come back of what is called 'French architecture'”], Kiến trúc, vol. 72, no. 4, 1998, p. 30–2 and Tôn Đaị, “Một thị hiêu không lành mạnh về hội chứng kiến trúc pháp”, [“Bad Taste in French Architecture”] Kiến trúc, vol. 100, no. 2, 2003, p. 64–7.

3 For example a presentation was delivered at the Hanoi school of architecture on this topic in July 2008 by Dr. Khuất Tân Hưng. The paper was entitled “Cuộc 'xâm lăng' thứ ba của 'kiến trúc pháp' vào Hà Nội” [“The Third French Architecture 'Aggression' to Hanoi”].

4 Hoai Anh Tran, Another Modernism?: Form, Content and Meaning of the New Housing Architecture of Hanoi, Lund: Dept. of Architecture and Development Studies, Lund University, 1999.

5 See the webpage of one of this complex D’Palais de Louis, premium suites here: http://palaisdelouis.com.vn/Articles/1409/926/tin-du-an/ngam-cung-dien-versailles-giua-long-ha-noi.aspx. Accessed 25 November 25 2013.

6 Heinz Schütte, “Aspects architecturaux de la transformation de Hà Nội après le Đổi Mới (1986): contradictions, phantasmes, espoirs,” Moussons, no. 13–14, 2009, Vietnam. Histoire et perspectives contemporaines, p. 185–204. URL: http://www.tamdaoconf.com/tamdao/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/04/Lagr%C3%A9e-Mousson.pdf. Accessed 22 January 2014.

7 This term is used in the way Arjun Appadurai uses it about culture and material culture: Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at large, Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.

8 See for example the Ciputra complex in Hanoi named after a rich Indonesian businessman who is the originator, see the project URL: http://www.ciputrahanoi.com.vn/. URL: Accessed 22 January 2014. Buildings in this complex seem inspired by haussmanian architecture, French regional style and the Italian renaissance.

9 See An Định, Hué’s Hidden Pearl, published online by the German Conservation and Education project. URL: http://issuu.com/gcrep/docs/an_dinh_hues_verborgener_schatz#/signup?. Accessed 4 October 2013.

10 Michèle Pirrazzoli-T'Serstevens, “The Emperor Qianlong's European Palaces,” Orientations, vol. 19, no. 1, November 1988, p. 61–71.

11 For more information on Wang Tai see Claudine Salmon’s commentary on the text of Tan Keong Sum, “Récit d’un voyage au Viêtnam,” Archipel, vol. 43, 1992, p. 145–166. On the commercial role of Want Tai: Jean-François Klein, Une histoire impériale connectée Hải Phòng jalon d’une stratégie lyonnaise en Asie orientale (1881-1886), Moussons, n°13–14, 2009, Vietnam. Histoire et perspectives contemporaines, p. 55, 95. URL: http://www.tamdaoconf.com/tamdao/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2010/04/Lagr%C3%A9e-Mousson.pdf. Accessed 22 January 2014.

12 Towkay, that is to say a Malaysian-Chinese business owner.

13 See Julian Davison (text) and Luca Invernizzi Tettoni, Singapore Shophouse, Singapore: Talisman Publishing, 2010 and Johannes Widodo, The Boat and the City: Chinese Diaspora and the Architecture of Southeast Asian Coastal Cities, Singapore: Chinese Heritage Centre; Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2004 (Architecture of Southeast Asian coastal cities series; Cultural studies).

14 See Khoo Joo Ee, The Straits Chinese, a Cultural History, Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur: The Pepin Press, 1996.

15 See Caroline Herbelin, Architecture et urbanisme en situation coloniale, le cas du Vietnam, PhD dissertation, Université Paris Sorbonne, 2010, p. 32–35.

16 Headquarters of the government services for the northern region of Indochina.

17 Jean-François Bayart and Romain Bertrand, “De quel 'legs colonial' parle-t-on ?,” Esprit, December 2006, p. 134–161.

18 Paul Veyne, Quand notre monde est devenu chrétien (312-394), Paris: Albin Michel, 2007, p. 265–266.

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Titolo Figure 1: House in the “New French Style” near Hanoi, 2008.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/392/img-1.jpg
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Titolo Figure 2: House in the “New French Style” near Hanoi, 2008.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/392/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 49k
Titolo Figure 3: Example of an house with elements inspired by the Municipal Theater built in 1910 by the French, Hanoi, 2008.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/392/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 81k
Titolo Figure 4: New house built in the "traditional" style, in Xuan Mai, Hanoi province, 2008.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/abe/docannexe/image/392/img-4.jpg
File image/jpeg, 128k
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Caroline Herbelin, «What is “French Style”? Questioning genealogies of “western looking” buildings in Vietnam»ABE Journal [Online], 3 | 2013, online dal 01 mars 2013, consultato il 29 mars 2024. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/abe/392; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/abe.392

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Caroline Herbelin

Lecturer, Université Toulouse II-Le Mirail, France

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