The Great Day of Five Ferries
Go Cong to Tra Vinh, February 22, 2020
Once upon a time I laid out a new route for a bicycle, one that relied on many ferries and could (just barely) be done in a day. Then I went and did it.
Why? Because Vietnam, especially in the Mekong Delta, is a world homeland of Folk Modernism. This is the place where Brutalism became a beloved vernacular. There are treasures everywhere. Getting off the main roads is the first step.
It added up to 110 km, the last part of which was on clinker, and then one other leg in the dark. It was a long day. Of all my days in Vietnam, it was the most deliberate, and the one that required the most faith. I strongly recommend it. Go fast on the easy parts, because the last part is rough, and the last ferry stops at sunset.
Go Cong, famous for its watermelons, is the easternmost city of the Mekong Delta. Like all the Delta cities, it is a museum of Folk Modernism, full of innovation and playfulness. This is the only region I know where high Modernism became folk architecture. The Modernist domestic architecture of Vietnam is a world treasure.
Until 1954, most houses like this in the countryside would have been made of mud, straw, and thatch. Vietnamese builders embraced concrete Modernism, because it used appropriate, available materials. But they adapted it too, shifting the screens and overhangs of the former wooden architecture into this new language.
The Mekong Delta is only half land, both by area and by commerce. The water is very important. And here, at the fringes of the sea, the land is turning salt. The balance is tipping towards the water.
The whole region is scattered with masterpieces of Folk Brutalism. This wonderful translation of a traditional Vietnamese pavilion into a Modernist house was not done by an architect. This is the work of a local craftsman, or even of a home artist. Concrete skills are extremely widespread in Vietnam. It would not be weird in many places, to just know how to build this.
This vernacular reached out, through the 1960s and 1970s, and replaced every rough-built house in South Vietnam. Even at the most modest level, concrete breeze-block Modernism became universal. In poor areas, many of these first-tier houses still exist.
The ferries stitch everything together. This distracts are not so distant, and the people are very mobile. Much of the Mekong Delta can be understood as a single huge suburb, filled with specialist areas, short on big centres. It’s fine for the region to be structured loosely, because of the motorbikes. They are like centaurs, think in centaur terms, and think nothing of riding an hour to go get something.
Many of the ferries, like this one, are free. They are bridges, essentially. For a cyclist like me, the ferries are much better than the bridges, because the bridges are major hills. The ferries are wonderful, because their anchorages are tamed, sort of, but they cross some very empty sectors, full of mystery and life. Bridges are not even half as fun as ferries.
This magnificent object near Ba Tri is a pinnacle of the Folk Art of the late 1990s, which was a time of huge invention. Dated 1999, this house adapts French Colonial architecture into a Painted Brutalist form, but with an archaic tile ridge on the roof. In the West, Modernism was an expensive style. In Vietnam, it was cheap, and normal people mage gems like this.
This composition, one of hundreds on this road, summarizes the clean Art Deco thinking of these houses. Many of these pieces, like the grills over the doors, are prefabricated. But the compositions are so individual. Vietnamese masons think about these forms like words, arranging them into new houses effortlessly. No two are the same. There are tens of thousands of them, and no two are the same.
Vietnamese Folk Brutalism embraces colour. In some ways, the main breakthrough was deciding to paint the concrete. This one has tiles too. In the West, this building would be Post-Modern, not Brutalist—because of the colour. In Vietnam, this is a false distinction. This building, with its wonderful 1960s concrete roof-comb and its pastiche colours, is both.
Every few hours on this route, the Great River would intercede, under many names. It would all be so genteel, so Modernist and almost perfected, and then the land itself would fail, and I would end up on some concrete deck, trying to figure out the rules for the ferry.
In the North, the current style is overtly Baroque, with (for example) fluted columns with bases. All of these components are prefabricated. They can be bought by the side of the road at the casting yards. On this house, the prefab columns mark a shift from the older frieze above, which was cast in place. This Baroque influence is still not widespread in the South. The change in technique is less that it seems. Plain or fluted, this is still a Brutalist building.
Modernism has always been elitist in the West, and most people have never liked it. In the Mekong Delta, Brutalist Modernism was fully embraced. It was the gateway to creating a new vernacular architecture capable of modernizing the country. This was not a violation of tradition, because the real tradition was a method of action, not a style. Because Vietnamese Folk Brutalism has not ten or a hundred architects, but half a million, the Mekong Delta is the world’s greatest treasury of the Modernist imagination.
In Ba Tri, a city not visited so often by architects, the whole central district is a museum of Folk Modernism, with sculptural buildings, breeze-block elements like textiles, and block after block of tidy Art Deco signs. I wanted to spend more time there, but there was no hotel.
It was extremely hot that day. 80 km in, I was getting tired, but I had a long way still to go. In these parts of the Delta, as in Cambodia, the Outside World is most detectable by colour. Local things, such as everything, do not have these colours.
Gasoline and potato chips. Feeling like a stranger, I wondered what else the Outside World had brought to this place, and saw gasoline and potato chips.
Buildings are always fragile in Vietnam. As in Japan, new buildings are considered better than old ones. The foundational tier of Modernist buildings. hybrids between ancient methods and stark Brutalism, are endangered now. Some of the early masterpieces, like this one, are one-storey tile-roofed traditional forms—impossible to add to, and thus doomed in any growing city.
The boundary between land and sea is failing in the Mekong Delta. These former rice paddies are too salty now for rice, and are being remade as shrimp farms. The main cause, so far, is ground subsidence, not global warming. South Vietnam is very vulnerable to climate change.
The race for the last ferry was not dignified. The road was made of gravel and clinker, and the ferry was not marked. I went back and forth, trying to find it, before I saw a motorbike take an odd path, and followed that. And I got there late, but the boat was there, and then I had to ride in to Tra Vinh and find a hotel at night. What a day.
