For two years now, I've checked the Vietnamese Modernist Architecture Facebook group almost every day. Here, members post photos of mid-century modernist architecture they find across the country, and I still get a little excited when a house I've never seen appears in the feed.

About four months ago, I noticed a shift: the notifications became more frequent, and suddenly I was watching the group grow by hundreds of members a day. I wondered when it would slow down, but it never did. Today it sits at nearly 150,000 members, up from 40,000 last year, almost quadrupled in a matter of months: Vietnamese modernism is making a comeback.

For decades, almost nobody was paying attention to Vietnamese modernism, neither internationally nor locally. Internationally, it was overshadowed by better-documented tropical modernisms like Brazil, India, or Ghana, which had international “starchitects” like Le Corbusier, Niemeyer, and Fry to hype them up. Locally, it became too common to notice, as so many people built their houses in modernist style that it became vernacular, part of the street furniture, like the red ghế nhựa or the Cooper Black lettering on every storefront. Even tourists are more easily seduced by a bubblegum-pink church than a plain grey shophouse. When things are perceived as ordinary, they often lose value.

Modernism was once the optimistic look of a newly independent Vietnam, but it gradually became a “poorer” aesthetic; a house you upgrade away from the moment you can afford something newer. Many have been destroyed for that reason. Buildings from before 1975, the golden age of Vietnamese modernism, make up only 15% of the country's built environment, according to a 2024 study based on Ministry of Construction data.

The Vietnamese Modernist Architecture group was founded in 2015 by Mel Schenck, Tom Hricko, Tim Doling, and Hoanh Tran, with Saigoneer as an early sponsor. For a decade, the group remained as overlooked as the houses it documented. It was a space for a devoted handful to archive buildings before they vanished and pay tribute to the architects who laid the foundations of the movement, such as Ngô Viết Thụ, Lê Văn Lắm, and Nguyễn Quang Nhạc. Today the group is shifting from niche documentation to mass admiration, and I’ve stopped counting the number of “Đẹp quá!” (so beautiful) in the comment section. 

What's driving this comeback, I believe, is nostalgia. More precisely, urban nostalgia: the specific kind that takes hold in cities that never stop rebuilding themselves, where the built environment looks nothing like it did a few years ago. Modernism is rarely loved by the general public, so nostalgia is an unusual emotion to attach to it. Yet people now come to the group to revisit memories, and the comments turn into something close to love letters to a version of Vietnam that is disappearing. A few quotes from the comment section:

The same happens under my own photos on Instagram:

Probably the comment that best sums up these quotes is a gif a group member posted: the scene from Ratatouille where a single bite throws the food critic back to his childhood in his mother's kitchen. That sudden rush of nostalgia is exactly what these modernist house photos now seem to trigger. Perhaps that's the power of vernacular architecture. Because these modernist houses are so common, so woven into everyday life, they hold a whole population's collective memory, like an architectural madeleine de Proust.

This growing interest in the nostalgic isn't only about architecture. It’s part of a wider retro wave in Vietnam, visible in a few Instagram accounts celebrating the recent past: Sách hơi cũ finds, rents, and sells old art books; Slowz Nguyen digs up and remixes old Vietnamese music, often pre-1970s; Soulvenir posts vintage photography of a Vietnam that’s fading away.

There seems to be a mechanism at work similar to the west's recent Y2K revival: an optimistic era leaves behind an aesthetic that people reach back for when the present turns anxious. In the west, one of those eras was the turn of the millennium, a fresh start where technology glowed with promise. Two decades later, in our doomscrolling, hyper-connected world, flip phones and the Frutiger Aero aesthetic are trending again as a reassuring memory. For Vietnam, that era was post-independence: although still at war, a young nation had a modern future ahead of it, and modernist houses were lining every street. What people might miss isn't only the concrete, but also the confidence of the era that poured it.

What people get nostalgic about usually ends up trendy. I knew Vietnamese modernism had crossed over when L'Officiel Vietnam asked to feature my photos. Scroll their Instagram, and it's top models, makeup, celebrities, then, suddenly, a concrete house pops into that immaculately curated fashion feed.

The clearest proof that the style is trending is that people have started simulating it. In 2024, Cà Phê Linh opened a café in Xuân Hòa that I took for a restored mid-century building the first time I saw it. It was built from scratch instead, reproducing the modernist codes exactly: đá rửa finish, pergolas with stars, moons and suns, gạch hoa, gió tiles, diamond motifs.

Cà Phê Linh's first location, opened in Xuân Hòa in 2024, was built from scratch in mid-century style. Photo by Alexandra van der Essen.

The entrance's vintage style includes an enamel sign, leather armchairs, and a tiled floor, while modernist details on the façade include a diamond motif and đá rửa finish. Photo by Alexandra van der Essen.

The owners judged the look marketable enough to build a new house pretending to be an old one. They were right, and the place is always packed, with a second one having opened in Saigon in late 2025. Other shops have followed, such as Mai An 1983 or Tibon by Jayden in Long Xuyên. By that point, what's being imitated isn't Vietnamese modernist architecture; it's a successful appearance. The copying of a copy, like a game of telephone, continues until it becomes a new architectural species entirely.

Cà Phê Linh's second location opened in Saigon in late 2025. Photo by Alexandra van der Essen.

Meanwhile, more and more cafés and bars are opening inside real modernist houses. Given how much of Vietnamese daily life happens in cafés, this is helping reframe the style as culture rather than just something old. The loudest example came from Highlands Coffee, Vietnam's largest coffee chain, which turned a modernist villa along Hoàng Văn Thụ into its first drive-thru. A TikTok influencer campaign accompanied the opening, with some videos reaching more than 1 million views. It’s a sort of circular logic: businesses choose modernism because they sense trend potential, and every opening makes it a little trendier still.

Left: The modernist villa as it was before Highlands. Photo courtesy of the former owners' family.
Right: Its current state as Highlands Coffee's first drive-thru. Photo by Alexandra van der Essen.

I wrote to a few café owners to ask why they reused a modernist house rather than building new, as most do, and nostalgia came up in every answer.

The owner of Căn Nhà Cũ Coffee, in Củ Chi, grew up in these houses and wants to pass the feeling on. “With the increasing trend of modernization, I want to bring back the old feelings, the images of society from the past,” he told me. “I want to bring a space and a touch of nostalgia to today's youth.”

For the team behind NEO-HBT, it's about preserving a piece of their childhood: “As '90s kids growing up in Saigon, mid-century modernist architecture was the familiar backdrop of our childhoods. Watching these signature structures disappear across the city has been heartbreaking.”

Beyond nostalgia, the revival is also a matter of pride in a heritage that Vietnamese are starting to claim. At NEO-HBT, roughly 90% of what you see is the original structure. “Looking back at our architectural history, figures like architect Ngô Viết Thụ and his contemporaries contributed immensely to establishing a distinct southern Vietnamese modernist identity that could stand proudly on the global stage. This house is a living piece of that legacy, and keeping it alive is an essential part of sharing our design culture with the world.”

Bảy Coffee, Đà Nẵng. The owner kept the 1986 house for its “historical value, solid architecture, and the precision of its decorative lines.” Photo by Tui đi cà phê.

Keeping a house like this is rarely the easy option. At 3.Coffee, opened by 3 Hào Cà Phê, clearing the property involved removing more than 25 truckloads of trash on the first day alone, and the owner was working on a short lease, with no guarantee of staying long enough to earn the investment back. They did it anyway, wanting to “preserve as much as possible of a place that I personally find beautiful and meaningful.” The payoff comes from customer reactions. Some older visitors tell them certain corners remind them of old Saigon houses. “To me, that is a very special compliment. I hope that when people come here, they don't just see a beautiful café to take photos in. I hope they can also feel a little of the memory, atmosphere, and spirit of an old Saigon home.”

The entrance of 3.Coffee with windflower ventilation tiles. Photo by San Dô.

Beyond cafés and chains, the trend has reached the housing market too. The Facebook group is filling with members trying to buy, sell, renovate, or build a modernist house. One real estate agent posted a listing that turned the nostalgia into a sales pitch: “In the heart of Saigon, we return to the peaceful old houses of the 60s and 70s. Villa for sale on Nguyễn Văn Đậu Street, Bình Thạnh District.” Others are choosing to restore rather than demolish, and come to the group for advice: “Is this house considered modernist, everyone? I want to renovate it and keep the original style, maybe add more modernist elements. Any idea of the cost, or experience with this kind of project?”

A family photo of the house posted to the group.

Then there are those who want the look badly enough to build it from scratch: “Most modernist houses are old, has anyone built a new one in this style?” Modernism has become something to build, buy, and sell, a wild reversal for a style usually bulldozed in Vietnam.

Newly built houses in modernist style, completed in 2025.

So, why a comeback now? A revival like this rarely has a single cause. It's more of a domino effect, and the pieces are hard to fit into one picture: the Facebook group, the book by Mel Schenck, the one by Phạm Phú Vinh, Nguyễn Ngọc Sơn's years of archival work, coffee shops, the slow build of nostalgia, each feeding the next.

The most identifiable trigger, though, might have been a single announcement. On May 19, news broke that Quy Hòa, the historic modernist leprosy village in Quy Nhơn, would be relocated to make way for a tourist mega-resort: one built for 40,000 residents and with a master plan including... flying taxis. It felt like the last straw after so many resort projects erasing local heritage. And the timing coincides: the announcement landed right when activity on the Facebook group took off.

Two of many modernist houses at Quy Hòa that are still being used, but now scheduled to make way for a resort. Photos by Alexandra van der Essen.

Put together, Vietnamese modernism's revival runs on three layers. First, a documentary one: the scholars, authors, and archivists who made the case that this architecture was worth paying attention to. Then a sociological one: a population turning nostalgic as the country keeps rebuilding itself around them. And finally a commercial one: the magazines, coffee chains, and TikTok accounts that are turning it into something marketable and viral, some of them opportunists, many of them genuine lovers of the style. Each layer feeds the next, documentation giving nostalgia something to hold onto, nostalgia giving the market something to sell.

It would be easy to shrug at all this; of course nostalgia revives old things, that's what nostalgia does. But nostalgia for modernism, at this scale, may be close to unheard of. Modernism has rarely been embraced by the public, with a few exceptions such as Brazil. Vietnam represents another, with ordinary people having chosen the style en masse to build their own houses. That first anomaly created a second one, mainstream modernist nostalgia, felt not only by trendy brutalist Instagram accounts, but by the general public too. What got these houses bulldozed, being everywhere, is exactly what makes people miss them now. Concrete brise-soleils make people think “this looks like my grandfather's house” with tears in their eyes; modernist elements get reproduced in fashionable café concepts. There's something poetic about all of this: a modernism once built by the people, for the people, is being slowly reclaimed by the people all over again.