Modernizing the Vietnamese Modern „Tube-House“

Higher Comfort – Lower Energy

Despite growing interests in green-building and energy-efficient building, many new green developments in Vietnam’s construction sector mainly focuses on improving the design of mostly high-rise buildings by implementing new and high-tech active systems rather than offering passive and simple climate responsive solutions for better performance. Moreover, the tube-house, which accounts for 60% of Vietnamese urban population, is degrading due to not receiving proper interests.

Knowing as one of the most iconic images of Vietnamese’s modern architecture, the Vietnamese modern tube-house has been designed for higher useful area on a minimum footprint. Because of this unique approach, several important aspects of architecture, such as: human comfort, energy usage, and even the cultural connection between tradition and modernity are often neglected, thus result is an inefficient design with limited access to daylight and heavily dependent on air conditioning.

This project aims to provide a range of passive solutions for the Vietnamese modern tube-house in order to not only solve problems in growing demands of usable spaces but also to achieve greater performance in thermal comfort and daylight availability while at the same time having lower environmental impacts. A casestudy representing the design of modern tube-house in Vietnam is selected and tested with distinct solutions for locations like Hanoi and Hochiminh City, two biggest cities in Vietnam which differ in term of climate.

The evaluation shows that an approach inspired by Vietnamese vernacular architecture in organizing different living spaces can offer better daylight condition, both in quantity and quality. In addition, having an improved façade as well as providing elevated airspeed can increase the thermal comfort while only using 50% of electricity in comparison with the basecase.

Mentor: Felix Thumm, Alejandra Cassis, Tommaso Bitossi

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Vu Hoang – Vietnam

Vu Hoang – Vietnam

After his Bachelor in Civil Engineering at the National University of Civil Engineering in Hanoi,
Vu joined the E4G team - a project of Fairventures Worldwide gGmbH in Vietnam. He was responsible for developing, monitoring and updating a database for green and energy efficient buildings and managing the projects network.