HO CHI MINH CITY, VIETNAM – For decades, 67-year-old Nguyễn Thị Hai and her three younger sisters had lived apart, each cooped up in shabby apartments they referred to as “cubbyholes” in Ho Chi Minh City. Now in their twilight years, the women vowed to look after each other under the same roof, in a house they imagined would be “just as breezy as the outdoors.” To make their dream a reality, Hai entrusted Trần Thị Ngụ Ngôn and Nguyễn Hải Long from Tropical Space, a Vietnamese firm which specializes in climate-resilient architecture. After two drawn-out years of construction due to the Covid-19 pandemic, an orange cubic house made of exposed bricks loudly emerged among the pale tube houses and faux-colonial villas in the city’s Nha Be district. “People refer to our house as the ‘unplastered’ house,” Hai laughed. “It looks so naked to passers-by that they keep asking us, ‘Is that it? Are you done building it?’” The “naked” house is more than complete. Perforated brick façades shield the residence from harsh sunlight and usher in cool breezes. Inside, a vertical rectangular void spans four floors, collecting light and releasing heat through two semicircular skylights and four balconies. Red brick, the firm’s favorite material, is a key to the house’s adaptive temperature. During Mekong Eye’s mid-day visit in July 2023, when the sun was blazing and rain had been absent for two days, the walls’ outer surfaces were scorchingly dry, but their inner sides remained cool. In the yard at the back, the porous bricks are propped up as pavements to absorb rainwater and prevent flooding during the monsoon season. Since moving in last year, Hai has noticed positive changes about her health. She sleeps better and exercises more, having to tend to a variety of plants in the house. “We barely turn the air-conditioner on – it’s only decoration now,” Hai said, pointing to the unit hidden inside her bedroom’s cupboard. The women hardly use the lights either. “Our motto is to design houses that can regulate their own body through all kinds of native weather,” Ngụ Ngôn told Mekong Eye. “As the weather turns harsher every year, people have become very scared and tend to shut it out,” added Hải. “We want to design spaces to invite them back [to nature], where they can safely enjoy and interact with the surrounding nature.” Tropical Space is not the only firm taking changing climate into account. As Vietnam braces for more frequent extreme weather events, a growing vanguard of architects is forging ahead with sustainable responses. Call it bioclimatic architecture, biomimicry or green architecture, the movement, which emerged in Vietnam in the early 2010s, has a common underlying principle. It is the integration of nature into designs, whether mimicking ecological principles, using natural elements or adapting to the surrounding environment. However, this philosophy is not new. Environmentally adaptive architecture dates back thousands of years and green architecture found its footing globally in the 1970s. Vietnam’s green architecture movement, therefore, is simply a return to the old days. Aside from Tropical Space’s “breathing homes,” examples of climate-friendly solutions devised by Vietnamese architects include the incorporation of plants, gardens and bodies of water to filter dust and regulate indoor air, the revival of traditional designs and materials such as thatched roofs and earthen walls for thermal insulation, bamboo to abate emissions and the re-use of scrap materials. “They have many amazing inventions that are so smartly played, they can be applied around the world,” said Hana Abdel, senior projects curator at the Arch Daily, the world’s most visited architecture website. Vietnamese projects published on the site, 886 of them so far, usually attract great traffic from countries from the south with similar climates, Hana revealed. “You don’t need to go out of your way to get green and sustainable solutions, but they can be cheap, simple and accessible,” said Hana. The Arch Daily curator believes that if proper advancements, such as investment in education and favorable policies, are put in place, Vietnamese architects have the potential to become world leaders in sustainable designs. Revisiting history Vietnamese architecture’s relationship with nature in the past few centuries has been cyclical, with moments of departure and others of harmonization. The idea of environment-adaptive spaces is not novel. For generations, Vietnamese homes have featured high attics, steeped tiled roofs, large and long courtyards, woven panels and wooden columns to optimize ventilation and lighting. French colonists in the 19th century also adapted their architecture to the tropics using louvered shutters, balconies and wide windows.