Architect Mel Schenck set about creating his ideal home in one of the city’s lesser-known districts
By Calvin Godfrey
Like many Americans of a certain vintage, Mel Schenck’s initial experience of Vietnam was coloured by war. Schenck first arrived in Ho Chi Minh City – then Saigon – in November 1971 to manage civil contracts awarded by the US Navy. During his yearlong deployment, he worked closely with Vietnamese teams building everything from movie theatres to hospitals to bridges.
He recalled wanting to come back, some day.
“I liked the people,” he remembers as he reclines in the square wooden armchair he crafted for the airy living room in his unique home, which he calls the “Breeze House” in Ho Chi Minh City’s Tran Phu District. “They seemed to have an innate sense of design and took care to make sure things looked good.”
During the war years, Tran Phu contained little beyond rice paddies and dirt roads and it remains remote to most those in the city’s cosmopolitan core.
Although Ho Chi Minh City is increasingly popular with foreign expatriates, few venture down the motorbike-choked lanes that cut through this outer suburb like so many cracks through a windshield.
Schenck, who is originally from Montana, spent his civilian career in San Francisco where much of his work involved historical restoration. After thirty years, however, the city came to feel conservative and cold in climate and in feel.
When an opportunity to return to Vietnam’s southern hub arose in 2005, he leapt at the chance.
“The first thing I did was try to track down my old projects,” he says. But roads had moved. Bridges had washed out. Saigon had ballooned from two million to 10 million souls. “I gave up after that first year.”
Schenck spent a decade doing consulting work from apartments all over the city before deciding to build a home in Tran Phu mostly due to the affordable cost of land and the proximity to friends of his Vietnamese wife Oanh.
“It’s messy, but I think people are becoming more attracted to that in the information age because it reflects the energy of the people,” he says of his somewhat unlikely locale. “When things start getting too orderly, that’s a problem, because it means you aren’t going anywhere.”
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Schenck looked at 20 lots before purchasing a one-story home in his residential alleyway. Using open-source software he sketched out the Breeze House and hired his Vietnamese brother-in-law to oversee the construction, which took just six months from demolition to completion.
As such, the building only occupies 60 percent of the lot, allowing ample space for tropical gardens both front and back. Each room features a balcony that extends straight out through glass doors.
Every day, his wife tends to their rooftop garden.
The central staircase ensures a constant flow of both light and air, enough to nurture the small “jungle” Schenck planted in the centre of his living room. Each interior cross-wall features a row of sleek louver windows, which are only ever battened down during the still, scorching dog days of the dry season.
The rest of the time, natural air flows through the house like wind through a whistle.
Schenck always assumed he would retire on the plains of Montana. Instead he found himself settled in what many in the West would interpret as chaos.
“Life here is so intense – the smells, the tastes, even the audio,” he agrees. “I can’t go back; I get my energy from the people, particularly the young people. It’s what keeps me going here.”
Every week, he holds a seminar for a group of architecture students and attempts to impart how the city (and country) offers a beautiful incarnation of the principles he studied 50 years ago.
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“I’ve been to all of the modernist centres: Miami, Mexico City, Japan,” he says. “There’s more modernist architecture in Vietnam than anywhere else in the world.”
Most homes in Ho Chi Minh City contain elaborate protections against would-be burglars – a requirement Schenck transformed into a design opportunity.
“I’ve been in houses here with bars inside the windows and it makes you just feel like you’re in jail,” he says. “I’d rather be in a bird cage.”
Schenck provided a steel worker with a few general guidelines and then told him to build it like an artist. The result is a lattice of random and inter-connected steel bars that acknowledge the connectivity and random nature of the information age.
Schenck says Tran Phu’s removal from the city’s tawny colonial core allow him the time and space he needs to hone his Vietnamese and write. Yet he finds himself constantly drawn into the outside world through his cell phone and computer.
Otherwise, life in the Breeze House feels vaguely rural.
Each day begins with the crow of fighting cocks kept by his neighbours, while pigs amble in the vacant lot out back.
His wife tends a vegetable garden on the penultimate floor and relatives occupy the guest rooms built on the second floor. When the whole family comes down from the north of the country to visit, they push aside all of the sleek wood furniture Schenck designed and eat together on the floor.
Every morning, Schenck eats breakfast on the street and then takes a stroll through a neighborhood free of any noticable western influence.
“I’m addicted to the intensity of life here; every day I see something new and I learn,” he says with no small amount of pride. “If I was sitting back in Montana it would be a long time before I learned anything again.”
Source : property-report.com
Read more…Inside a Viet vet’s custom-built home in Ho Chi Minh City
