Advent with the flourishing development of technology realm by early 20th century, the very first cars that were accessible to the masses in 1980 did shake the canonical proposals for urban planning at that time and require new defined design method for its upcoming high speed circulation. From the very beginning, this is a new field and utterly blank space for each separated expertise like urban planners, architects, engineers, which require many experiments and gradually learning process to archive what we have today. But until 21st century lately, the common technique of modernist planning has been yet a tendency to separate function as means of resolving conflicts (Linda Pollak, 2006) that highways in specific and roads in general  always play a role as villains in the scene. This separation is much of disjunction between thinking of local, global and metropolitan affairs. They are deployed in every hierarchical layers that have differences of priority being subject to who concern it. But thanks to the notion of landscape urbanism (Charles Waldheim) and some dominant practices from Rem Koolhaas, West 8 and many others who showed us how they concerned about this issue and reveal a positive chance to think about it.
Bridging the gap between architecture, landscape, infrastructure and urban planning is not a very new headline but in an era of exploded and overlapping ideology, it has been treated in many different ways. Since landscape has been defined in a very ambiguous way, that every piece of territory having relation to human is considered as landscape, there are unlimited ways to think about this combination that suggests a possibility to look at a building as a garden and vice versa. A garden here I don’t mean erecting a building as green as possible in a semantic and visible way, can’t argue that vegetation still and will be inevitable element in designing, but a garden that focuses on collective spirits of social life and tie over separated layers of urban dimension into one single forum that thrives the social participation.

Hanoi, has been capital of Vietnam since 1976, is the largest city in Vietnam with total 3328 m2 and second crowded city with population approximate 7 million people. One in two metropolitan cities of Vietnam, Hanoi is situated in the north clinging to the system of Hong river and Cuu Long delta.
Inevitably, the globalization has had a profound effect on Vietnam in general and Hanoi in specific. The deterritorialization phenomenon which is induced by mediascape and financescape has happened since the very beginning of this city base on its central position on trading trajectory, therefore it has been playing a role as the magnet to other Vietnamese cities’ population. That makes this city growing in size and density of citizens since then and there is no sign of slowing down til now, and even more since 2008 Hanoi has jointed Ha Tay, the town next to it, into its governed territory and extend its area size to one half more. In a way, Hanoi performed the same story with all other metropolitan cities in the world by urban sprawling and historical centering feature, but at the same time it’s quite different in some way because the periphery of this city is still developing in an intimate way relatively as the very center with tube houses organized close to each other without big gardens surrounding them. Due to its expanding in size and economic potential, Hanoi is demanding a second center that has sufficient space for erecting new monumental buildings and rearranging resident groups surrounding it. This new center is situated adjacent to two main arteries which run along two sides of the biggest lake in Hanoi, and being equipped with governmental, leisure and residential buildings. Saving the bad side of this sprawling and extending center, in its bright side many opportunities have been opened for this city to have more high quality and big scale buildings that would contribute to its citizens’ social life and the city itself.
This second part of city contains some interesting primary uses that attract people there but those facilities are built separately and put up fences against each other in order to define their pay-to-use territory, while the free-to-go public spaces are basically sidewalks, underconstructed lands, natural lawns. By the time this portfolio is written, this area is still in developing and citizens’ life here is still based on intimate relationship of small villages, but sadly the invasion of ideology about mass production in architecture has arrived Vietnam later than other countries and I think in the very  near future most of these residential areas will be transferred into same identity housing. Therefore, in my concern it needs something very iconic to call people from all over the city and simultaneously must have preserved space for social ties to strengthen the current community that could handle fluid of coming strangers.

The chosen site situates between two roads, one is primary but dull in imaginability and the other is small but pleasant because of its proximity to West lake. The very first attempt is to connect these two different level together by a building that opens to both directions and allow the possibility to cross between these two roads and generate the transmission of office uses on one side and residential areas on the other. It was imagined with some courtyards and indoor forums which are connected by a system of corridors, all these form a base that will hold a monumental building upon it. This landmark was chosen to be a theatre due to the lack of this facility in Hanoi and its needed leisure facility and shaped based on the convenient climate for its users which is indispensible for every kind of buildings in Vietnam due to its harsh weather and high rate of energy consumption.

Described tendency to connect supportive infrastructure and the building itself is brought into reality by two term, one is physical succession of building form and the other is staging and overlapping of building’s primary function and social function. In the visible view, this building is designed in way that allow visitors to walk continuously from the lowest level to the very top peak of building by passing through a system of ramps that the building itself is a part of sloppy continuation.

In the other hand, this building and its mass ground divide the whole site into smaller indoor and outdoor areas that accommodate enough room for every kind of activities. These activities happen around the primary use as theater could improve the level of education in this society itself and draw people who have interest in this high level of art to it. The building is one part of the ground and the landscape but simultaneously is separated due to its function, leaving two small courtyards as the semi space between itself and the ground.

Building contains two auditoriums, bigger one serving 600 spectators and the smaller one serving 200 ones. They are arranged to have the same supportive areas that rise up to 6 stories and provide plenty of storages, rehearsal spaces, dressing rooms etc. These two main auditoriums point to two different direction of north and east, leaving the space of two small courtyards in between which are separated by a straight longitudinal two-story corridor, this space is exactly the joint of all the horizontal levels which are both indoor and outdoor, a place that is used as the resting place yet provide the opportunities for all separated fluids to tie together.

Title: WesT
Catalogue: Academic project - Architectural design
Institution: Hanoi Architectural University (HAU, Hanoi, Vietnam)
Evaluation: 9/10 (by professors)
Function: Culture
Project area: 45000 m2
Project year: 2011