Tag Archives: Vietnam

The Hanoi House With 100 Windows and No Two the Same

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The name alone stops you. 100 Windows. Not “The Pavilion House” or “House No. 7” or something equally poetic and vague. Just a count. A blunt, almost confrontational declaration of exactly what you’re getting, and yet somehow, the moment you see it, the name feels like the most understated thing about it.

Designed by Hanoi-based architecture practice Inrestudio, this multi-generational home is wrapped in a terracotta-toned, double-layered exterior punctured by irregularly placed, mismatched openings. The windows aren’t uniform. They don’t line up in neat rows or follow a rational grid. They appear across the facade like a scatter of thoughts, some large, some small, some square, some elongated, placed with an intention that reveals itself slowly the longer you look. It’s controlled disorder, the kind that only happens when someone has thought very carefully about where chaos is allowed to go.

Designer: Inrestudio

The project sits within one of Vietnam’s most distinctive and genuinely challenging housing typologies: the tube house. These long, narrow urban homes are a product of Hanoi’s history, born from a time when property taxes were levied on street frontage, pushing families to build deep and vertical rather than wide. The tube house is, by nature, a compromise. You work with what the city gives you. What Inrestudio does here is refuse to let that constraint become a ceiling.

The double-layered envelope is the key move. By wrapping the home in two skins instead of one, the architects create what they call “in-between spaces,” zones that exist between the inner living areas and the outer facade. These aren’t wasted margins or dead air. They’re transitional, purposeful areas where the house breathes, where light filters and shifts through the day, where the rigid boundary between inside and outside softens into something more generous. It’s the kind of spatial thinking that doesn’t photograph easily but completely transforms the experience of actually being in a building.

This matters especially because 100 Windows was designed for multiple generations living under one roof, a reality that remains far more common in Vietnam than it does in most Western countries. Designing for multi-generational life is genuinely hard. You’re negotiating different rhythms, different needs for privacy and togetherness, different relationships to noise, light, and air. Architecture that understands this doesn’t just divide a floor plan into labeled rooms. It creates conditions where people can be near each other without being on top of each other, where the house itself does some of the social negotiating.

The terracotta tones feel right for this, too. The palette connects the building to its climate, to the warmth and humidity of Hanoi, to the earth tones of traditional Vietnamese buildings without becoming a costume or a nostalgia piece. It reads as contemporary without trying to distance itself from its own context, which is a balance a lot of architecture gets wrong in either direction.

What you take away from 100 Windows isn’t really about the windows, or at least not literally. It’s about the idea that a constraint, whether it’s a narrow plot, a shared family life, or a hundred openings that need to somehow feel cohesive, can become the source of design rather than the obstacle to it. The windows are a by-product of a layered system, not a stylistic decision made in isolation. That’s what earns it attention beyond the aesthetic.

Architecture like this tends to get filed under “interesting regional work” and not looked at as broadly as it deserves. But the conversation 100 Windows is having about density, family, and what a facade actually owes its inhabitants is one that any city grappling with urban housing should be paying attention to. It’s not proposing a universal solution. It’s doing something more useful: showing what happens when designers take the specific conditions of a place seriously enough to build something genuinely shaped by them. The result is a house that looks singular because it is.

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A Home That Stays Rooted: This Multigenerational Vietnamese House Preserves What Urbanization Erases

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In the outskirts of Hanoi, where sprawling urbanization steadily encroaches on traditional village life, Trung Tran Studio has completed a residence that refuses to erase what came before it. The Nang House, a 270-square-meter dwelling for three generations, sits quietly among established homes and mature trees, each element of the natural landscape carefully preserved rather than cleared away. Completed in 2025, this project emerges at a moment when rapid development threatens to break down the traditional rural structure that has defined these communities for generations.

The architecture speaks through brick, that most fundamental of building materials, reimagined through contemporary forms. Textured walls rise in modular patterns, their surfaces catching light at different angles throughout the day. Arches and circular openings punctuate the structure, creating portals that guide movement while framing views of the gardens beyond. The material choice feels both pragmatic and poetic, grounding the home in local building traditions while pushing toward something unmistakably modern. High wooden ceilings and curved details highlight the angularity of the masonry, creating an interplay between rigid geometry and organic warmth.

Designer: Trung Tran Studio

What makes this project remarkable is its relationship with the site. Trees that have stood for years remain rooted in their original positions, their trunks accommodated by deliberate notches carved into rooflines. The canopy spreads over a central courtyard, blurring boundaries between interior and exterior spaces. This garden becomes the heart of the home, a breathing space where sunlight filters through leaves and generations gather. The design creates an airy, earthy dwelling where indoor and outdoor zones converge seamlessly, allowing natural ventilation to flow through the porous brick facade.

The floor plan unfolds as a series of carefully sequenced rooms wrapped around a central void. Living areas, dining spaces, and a worship room occupy the core, treated as a continuous zone for family life. Light enters through narrow clerestory windows set high along pitched ceilings, creating small, shifting patterns across the brick surfaces. The effect is subtle but transformative, making the walls appear alive as the sun moves overhead. This inner zone holds the main living functions, where textured brick walls meet timber elements at concise junctions.

The two-storey structure accommodates five bedrooms total, with four extending toward the rear of the property. Each is modest in size yet warm in character, shaped by timber ceilings and brick surfaces that create intimate, comfortable spaces. Framed views of the garden connect every room to the landscape, maintaining visual continuity throughout the home. The bedrooms are interspersed with three distinct garden spaces that serve different functions for the multigenerational household. This careful zoning allows privacy when needed while encouraging interaction in shared areas, creating a home that expands and contracts according to the rhythms of family life.

Trung Tran Studio’s approach resists the typical pattern of development in rapidly changing rural areas, where new construction often means wholesale clearing and starting fresh. Instead, the Nang House demonstrates how contemporary architecture can work with existing conditions, respecting what’s already there while creating something entirely new. This is architecture that understands context without being constrained by it, honoring tradition while refusing nostalgia. In a landscape where urbanization threatens to flatten everything in its path, the Nang House offers a different model, one where old trees and new walls coexist naturally, proving that progress needn’t come at the cost of erasure.

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A Floating $395M Opera House Inspired By Oyster Pearls Opens In 2027

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Construction has kicked off on what might be Southeast Asia’s most jaw-dropping cultural project—the Isola della Musica, a striking opera house designed by the legendary Renzo Piano that will literally float on Hanoi’s West Lake when it opens in 2027. You’d be hard-pressed to find a more dramatic setting for world-class performances.

The name means “Island of Music” in Italian, which feels fitting given Piano’s heritage and the venue’s extraordinary location on the Quang An Peninsula, nestled between West Lake and the newly created Đầm Trị Lake. At $394.5 million, this isn’t just about building another concert hall—it’s Vietnam flexing its cultural muscles on the global stage.

Designer: Renzo Piano Building Workshop and PTW Architects

A Pearl Born from History

Piano’s vision reaches deep into the lake’s past for inspiration. Generations of local farmers once made their living diving for massive freshwater oysters called “Trai,” hunting for those rare pearls that shimmer in pink, orange, and white. The opera house captures that heritage perfectly, its gleaming dome emerging from the water like nature’s own masterpiece, finally surfacing.

The architectural genius here lies in how Piano expresses what happens inside through the building’s outer shell. His team played with everything from soap bubble formations to catenary curves, crafting a double-layered structure that feels alive and organic. The building seems to breathe alongside the lake’s natural rhythms while maintaining the structural sophistication you’d expect from a Piano masterpiece.

Beyond the Stage

This 191,000-square-meter complex packs a serious punch with its 2,000-seat main theater, plus additional performance spaces that bump total capacity past 3,200. But calling it just an opera house sells it short—the venue will house museums, event spaces, and programming that goes way beyond traditional classical fare.

The real brilliance shows in how seamlessly it weaves into Hanoi’s fabric. The surrounding waterways, including the historic lotus pond at Pho Linh Pagoda and Thuy Su Lake, are getting full restoration treatment with native lotus replanting. Eight new boat docks will create water-based transit routes, including direct aquatic access to performances—imagine arriving at the opera by boat as the sun sets over West Lake.

A Cultural Capstone

The partnership between Piano’s workshop and Sydney’s PTW Architects brings world-class expertise to Vietnam’s cultural evolution. At 87, with 65 years of architectural mastery behind him, Piano could have chosen any project. Instead, he picked this Hanoi landmark as his latest legacy piece, seeing it as something truly special.

When the Isola della Musica finally opens in 2027, it’ll offer far more than spectacular performances. This floating pearl represents Vietnam’s cultural transformation, Piano’s enduring genius, and proof that great architecture can reshape both cityscapes and entire societies. Hanoi already has its gorgeous French colonial opera house—now it’s getting a contemporary cultural crown jewel that can stand toe-to-toe with the world’s greatest venues.

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