MAY 2023 · ESCAPE
Hanoi - old quarter architecture
Hanoi Old Quarter, Vietnam
The buildings in the Old Quarter are narrow because of a 15th-century tax on street frontage. You paid by the width, so you went deep instead. That constraint produced the tube house: two or three metres wide, twenty or thirty metres back, multiple floors. The constraint became the form, and the form became a district, and the district became a city.
The French colonial period layered on top: plaster facades, ornate window frames, ochre and grey. Now both are weathered together. A building on Hàng Bạc will have a French cornice decaying above a Vietnamese shopfront adapted in three different decades. The original taxonomy has been preserved in the street names — Hàng Gai means silk street, Hàng Bạc means silver — but the actual commerce has shifted and multiplied.
The building is occupied. That's the point. It isn't preserved — it's used.
Hanoi Old Quarter — May 2023
Walking through it, what hits first is the density, then the organisation within it. Laundry on lines strung from upper windows, three storeys up. Corrugated metal rooftops packed close, rust and silver, vines between them. On one corner, blue fabric canopies pulled out over the pavement, the yellow ochre plaster behind going soft in the shade. Red awnings on a market street with stools out, the same stools that appear everywhere in this city — low plastic, backlit, for street food or just sitting.
At one junction: a loaded bicycle against a concrete wall with green graffiti, a cluster of utility fixtures adapted and added to over time. The infrastructure shows. It doesn't hide. Overhead on another block, the power lines cluster into a web above a building — the wires and barrel utilities just stacked, monochrome against the facades.
The colonial plaster is genuinely deteriorating in places, with shop shutters pulled across at ground level and vegetation coming up through the courtyard behind a metal fence. The building is occupied. That's the point. It isn't preserved — it's used.
Weathered yellow and grey building facade with colonial window frames, shops below, laundry hanging above
Corrugated metal roofs in shades of rust and silver, clustered densely with vines creeping up sides
Street market scene beneath red fabric awnings, people seated on plastic stools, weathered facades above
Narrow alley corner with loaded bicycle, green graffiti on concrete wall, worn utility fixtures
Busy street lined with shops, motorbikes parked, colonial storefronts with blue and red signage
Mixed-use frontage: yellow ochre and grey buildings, shop awnings, stacked goods, parked scooters
Street facade with dramatic blue fabric canopy, aged yellow plaster, people gathered beneath shelters
Dense vertical composition of laundry lines, shuttered windows, concrete facades stacked organically
Street view with leafy tree, colonial and modern storefronts, motorbikes and pedestrians on road
Intersection view with vibrant blue billboards, parked scooters, mixed colonial and modern structures
Railway street with narrow-front buildings, green vegetation, perspective down historic guild street
Deteriorating facade with metal fencing, vines and plants in courtyard, hanging laundry and fixtures
Colorful street frontage: orange, rust-red, and grey buildings with modern shop signs and vehicles
Colonial-era building with decaying plaster, street-level shops with shutters, weathered charm
Multi-level building with yellow ochre and burgundy shutters, street vendors, motorbikes parked below
Narrow alley with dense scaffolding, stacked shops, motorbikes, and people navigating tight street
Tree-lined street with mixed colonial and contemporary shops, pedestrians walking past storefronts
Complex web of power lines above building, barrel and utilities stacked, monochrome urban density