Hommel Beer Factory
BIA HOI CULTURE'S ORIGIN: FROM A COLONICAL DRINKING TO A CULTURE OF URBAN DWELLERS
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Hanoi Ad hoc is dedicated to open-ended acts of theorizing, reevaluating urban ordinaries instead of finite descriptive works. This guideline will be the critical and fundamental core values of the project.
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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.
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Understand the reciprocal relationship between different urban entities. (from social housing, factories to cultural palaces)
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.
Hanoi Ad Hoc is a multiannual, interdisciplinary research framework and design programme. Initiated by Arch.Mai Hung Trung and joined by four partners: Professor/Anthropologist Christina Schwenkel, Arch.Duc Le, Designer/Researcher Ylan Vo.
The project’s title refers to its main purpose that focuses on the insight of tailored urban makings,and dealing specifically with contemporary urban issues of Hanoi. This design-oriented research hereby will provocatively reconfigure the contemporary vision about forgotten parts of Vietnamese modernism architecture,and shed light on everyday urban banalities.
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The urbanscape of Hanoi is a mosaic pattern made of improvised pieces. Our “Ad hoc” research accentuates on the current way of making, unmaking and remaking the city of Hanoi using “whatever is at hand” in order to conform with political, social and urban transformation? The Adhocism is visible from the urban to the architectural scale through adaptations of urban fabric within a given condition and spatial appropriations on the sidewalk.The project attempts hereby to examine its richness, and how these improvised urban solutions crystallized permanently the cityscape over time. Our three main acts or research are to archive, to theorize and to provoke.
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...)
Theorize
Provoke