In Hanoi, Vietnam—a city where the past and present coexist in a delicate, often chaotic dance—every alley, every faded French balcony seems to whisper stories of a different time. Yet as urban development surges forward, these voices are growing faint. Amid the construction dust and scaffold-covered facades, entire layers of the city’s architectural memory are quietly disappearing. Against this backdrop, the Architectural Association Visiting School Hanoi (AAVS Hanoi) is positioning itself not as a nostalgia project, but as a radical rethinking of what it means to preserve the urban past.
Running from July 7 to 20, 2025, the two-week program is not your average summer architecture course. Organized by the prestigious Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA) in London, AAVS Hanoi turns away from conventional heritage narratives to focus instead on what it calls “experimental preservation.” This means turning a critical eye toward 20th-century buildings that exist far outside the tourist trail or official heritage lists—structures often seen as mundane, obsolete, or simply in the way.
These are not grand monuments or iconic landmarks. They might be a Soviet-style office block built in the 1970s, a small cinema converted from an old shopfront, or even a concrete relief adorning the wall of a forgotten community center. What they all share is a quiet presence in the urban fabric—and a growing risk of being erased. AAVS Hanoi challenges students to document and understand these architectural “leftovers” before they vanish completely.
The tools of preservation are as modern as the mission is sensitive. Participants are trained in advanced digital methods—3D scanning, photogrammetry, filmmaking—to record, analyze, and reimagine the built environment. These technologies enable not only precise spatial documentation, but also deeper readings of the social and cultural contexts embedded in architectural forms.
One Berlin-based student, Marie, shared her moment of recognition when photographing a defunct government building in Hanoi’s west side. “It reminded me of my childhood in East Berlin,” she said. “That sense of order, repetition, control—it’s strange how concrete can carry emotion, even across continents.” Her observation sparked a broader discussion among the group about Cold War legacies, aesthetic ideologies, and architectural afterlives.
Yet the program is about more than technology. A series of lectures on Vietnamese architectural history, Southeast Asian modernism, and urban memory grounds the hands-on work in a robust theoretical framework. Local architects, curators, and academic partners join in to provide context and critique. Tutorials and peer reviews create an environment of collaboration and reflection, culminating in the creation of short narrated films that blend storytelling with spatial analysis. These films will be screened publicly—inviting the wider community into the conversation.
But at the core of AAVS Hanoi lies a deeper set of questions: What is heritage? Who gets to define it? And how do we preserve it in cities where demolition often feels like destiny? During a group critique, Thomas, a student from London, recalled his own experience with the demolition of a Brutalist housing block in Elephant and Castle. “It was ugly, even dangerous in parts,” he admitted. “But once we began documenting its social history—the migration patterns, the communal spaces—it stopped being just ‘a building’ and became something else. A vessel for memory.”
Hanoi is undergoing a similar transformation. Bulldozers move fast. Apartment towers rise even faster. Yet AAVS Hanoi offers a way to pause, look closer, and rethink preservation not as resistance to change, but as a conscious act of continuity. This doesn’t mean halting development. Rather, it suggests integrating memory into progress—honoring the messiness of urban life instead of erasing it.
The program fee is £700, including a £60 AA membership which provides access to the AA’s digital library, lectures, photo archive, and international forums. It’s a significant investment, but one that opens doors—not just academically, but intellectually and philosophically. Students leave not only with new technical skills, but with a renewed sense of what architecture can do: not just build the future, but hold onto the past in ways that feel urgent, empathetic, and real.
In a world increasingly obsessed with the new and the now, AAVS Hanoi gently but powerfully shifts the narrative. It asks: What are we forgetting? And, perhaps more importantly: What’s still worth remembering?
Sometimes, the most important architecture isn’t the most beautiful—it’s the most lived in, misunderstood, or quietly resilient. In those forgotten corners and crumbling facades, we might just find the blueprint for a more humane city.