Hanoi as an assemblage of façades and the Deleuzean diagonal cut

ABSTRACT

As Vietnam began to enjoy a modicum of affluence in the post-1986 reform era, households sought housing improvements that were variously low-cost, self-help, often improvised, disordered, illegal and, in their effect, informalizing the previously formal. In Hanoi, the ‘tube houses’ of the ancient city were extended vertically and randomly, often exuberantly decorated; the Soviet-gifted, walk-up, concrete blocks of workers housing were typically extended horizontally and randomly with precarious extensions from previously bland façades. These architectural forms are especially linked to the present identity of Hanoi space and enter variously into the artistic imagination of the city. The paper invokes insights from Gilles Deleuze to account for these effusions, notably the idea of the fold and the baroque moment, and the place of the ‘diagonal cut’ through the assemblages of history-memory that constitute nation, city and place.