Architect Vo Trong Nghia Shares Insight into his Environmentally-Friendly Bamboo Structures
May 4, 2021
By Joshua Zukas
The namesake principal of Vo Trong Nghia Architects, who puts bamboo to modern use, stands in his Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, studio. Photography by Doc Lap.
During 2020, Ho Chi Minh City–based green architect Vo Trong Nghia saw his environmentally-friendly bamboo structures propagate throughout his native Vietnam. Vo, who studied architecture at Japan’s Nagoya Institute of Technology and the University of Tokyo before opening his eponymous firm in 2006, added to his “House for Trees” collection residential projects that are home to both plants and people including the award-winning Bat Trang House in Hanoi. He embarked on the Dong Na Villas, a residential master plan replete with roads and restaurants outside Hoi An. But perhaps most arresting are three ambitious new bamboo buildings: the Vedana Resort Restaurant in Ninh Binh, the Huong An Vien Visitin
Completed in 2020 in Bát Tràng, Vietnam. Images by Hiroyuki Oki. The project is situated in a unique location of Bat Trang Town – a pottery village that has been around for more than 10 decades. The façade of the.
Vietnamese house wins UK architecture prize
By Dang Khoa January 23, 2021 | 12:00 pm GMT+7
Bat Trang House designed by Vo Trong Nghia has won for Best New Private House at the 2021 Wallpaper Design Awards given away by a British architecture magazine.
Nghia is renowned for using traditional and local materials in his designs, and Bat Trang House is no exception.
The building got its name due to its location near Hanoi’s Bat Trang village, famous for its centuries-old traditional pottery, and for its facade made of perforated red clay ceramic tiles.
Bat Trang House in Hanoi. Photo courtesy of Hiroyuki Oki.
Photography: Hiroyuki Oki
Vo Trong Nghia created this modern take on the traditional Vietnamese shophouse near Hanoi for an affluent artisanal family that produces high-quality ceramic products. Following the local vernacular, Bat Trang House combines commercial and residential spaces. The raised ground and lower ground floors serve as showrooms for the family to display and sell their products. Four additional private levels with a kitchen, living room, five bedrooms and several airy gardens sit above. The top floor includes a dedicated room for the family altar and an open-air swimming pool bordered by trees and plants. Vo wanted the personality and heritage of the craft village (Bat Trang, some 15km from Hanoi, is known for its ceramics production) to be evident in the architecture, so he wrapped the property in a wall made of perforated red clay ceramic tiles that he commissioned in the village. This ceramic cloak protects the house from the sun in the summer and from the wind i