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In 2016, as I continued to be more involved in the historic preservation efforts in my hometown Sài Gòn, I went down a rabbit hole to find the origin of various art motifs that were neither completely Vietnamese nor completely French. These motifs were not known to be endemic to French colonial architecture that one may expect to find in Vietnam. This is when I realized Vietnam adopted Art Nouveau rather early and readily, which is amusing because not a lot of people have discussed this; we seem to think Neoclassicism and Art Déco dominated the architecture in Vietnam, only to give way to other Modern movements. We sometimes neglect to ask ourselves what the missing link between the old and the new might have been.
In this research, I argue that the missing link was Art Nouveau, that the movement was more prominent in Vietnam than we thought, and that it was a bigger influence that defined colonial architecture in Vietnam than we gave it credit for.
Hotel Majestic, Saigon