For centuries, Hanoi moved on water.
Then it climbed onto a bicycle.
Then the French arrived, sold it the automobile, and parked Citroën Tractions outside their villas. Yersin got there first.
After the war, the French handed back the keys. The chrome went with them. So did the curves.
Hanoi climbed into a Lada.
A box on wheels. Unbreakable. Square. Completely uninterested in seducing anyone.
Exactly like its architecture.
Concrete no longer had to seduce.
It had to work.
When tropical modernism and brutalism arrived in Hanoi, a generation of architects trained across the Soviet bloc brought back a new language. The message was simple: stop pretending.
The city jumped straight from daddy’s Citroën Traction, with its bourgeois curves, imported elegance and colonial polish, to the Lada.
Square-cut. No frills. Built to survive.
Built for the battered roads of reconstruction, not for admiration.
And somehow, even today, it has more style than the SUVs and Rolls-Royces hidden behind the gates of the new rich. Razor-sharp lines. Generous volumes. A sculptural honesty that would make Pininfarina raise an eyebrow.
People walk past the Hanoi University of Science and Technology, the Children’s Palace or the historic VNPT headquarters without looking up. At the Friendship Cultural Palace, they barely notice the enormous concrete claustra—a giant lung cooling the building decades before sustainability became fashionable.
Modernism and brutalism never wanted to be beautiful.
That’s exactly why they became beautiful.
If you haven’t seen Hanoi in Doc Martens, you’ve only met her in slippers.
Bloody hell, mate, you’ve proper blown my mind with this one. I always reckoned I knew Hanoi, pagodas, French shutters, the usual postcard stuff, but this? Never in a million years. That brutal, cubist, Lada-on-concrete look is absolutely boss. You’ve made me look at the city with fresh eyes.
Sound, that’s me sorted then. I’m booking a flight, because I need to wander round these mad streets and see this side of Hanoi for myself.