My name is Vinh. I am an architect and author trained in Vietnam and France. Alongside my professional practice, I research mid-century Vietnamese modernist architecture and its linguistic structure.

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In 2016, I arrived in Saigon as a freshman at the University of Architecture Ho Chi Minh City. I was immediately struck and seduced by the city's diversity and its vibrant street culture. Behind that urban energy, I kept noticing a type of building that was particularly creative, yet no one knew what it was. I later found out that these buildings represented one of the most intensive applications of the modernist language in the world, yet almost completely unknown and undocumented.

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I quickly fell in love with the creative designs spotted from the seat of my everyday motorbike rides, and moved on to mapping out these buildings. Five years later, I published Poetic Significance: Sài Gòn Mid-Century Modernist Architecture, organizing my collected research to depict the historical process of modernism in Saigon and what it says about the cultural identity of Vietnam in the mid-twentieth century.

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From the ideas in the first book, I started to look at Vietnamese modernist architecture as a language system, learned and spoken by the public. As a result, ordinary people were able to recreate the modernist designs without prior architectural knowledge, turning this modernist language into a vernacular practice, a cultural component of modern Vietnam. These ideas present a new linguistic view of Vietnamese modernist heritage, which becomes the essential thesis of my next book, Syntactic Architecture: The Vernacular Language of Mid-Century Vietnamese Modernist Architecture.

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My work has been presented at USC School of Architecture, the Korea Foundation, and the Huynh Tan Phat Foundation. My writing has been published in Saigoneer, Hidden Architecture, ArchDaily, The Modernist, Urbanist Vietnam, and Southeast Asia Globe.