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Biography:
Mel Schenck is an American architect with five decades of experience managing design and construction. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree at Montana State University in 1970 and a Master of Architecture degree at the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. Mel began his career managing construction contracts to Vietnamese constructors for the U.S. Navy in Saigon and southern Vietnam in 1971/1972, where he became enamored with the Vietnamese mid-century modern architecture. After several years managing architectural projects in America, Mel managed the operations of KMD Architects, a San Francisco firm with offices in Asia and Mexico as well as major cities in the U.S. He returned to Vietnam in 2006 to direct master planning for a 325-hectare $1 billion resort and two new towns in the Ho Chi Minh City metropolitan area.
Since 2015, Mel has been a full-time researcher and writer focusing on Vietnamese architecture. He leads a weekly seminar on Vietnamese modernist architecture and history at the Huỳnh Tấn Phát Foundation in Ho Chi Minh City for university architecture and planning students. He is a member of the Society of Architectural Historians based in America as well as the National Coalition of Independent Scholars.
Recent scholarly activity:
Based on five years researching the extensive mid-twentieth-century modernist architecture in southern Vietnam, Mel Schenck published the book, "Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture" in 2020. The research established that southern Vietnam had become an unrecognized center of modernist architecture in the world based upon the overwhelming quantity of modernist architecture throughout southern Vietnam, its unique quality compared with modernist architecture around the world, and the fact that the Vietnamese citizens had obviously embraced modernism for their vernacular housing. Mel continues this research practice in preparation for articles on various subjects related to the book.
Subsequently, Mel edited the first book written by a Vietnamese scholar regarding Vietnamese mid-century modernist architecture and published it internationally under Mel’s imprint Architecture Vietnam Books. This book, entitled "Poetic Significance: Sài Gòn Mid-Century Modernist Architecture" by Pham Phu Vinh, provides the theory behind how the Vietnamese people themselves adopted the principles of global modernism, adapted its features to the tropical climate and dense urban environments, and developed a more poetic version of modernism that expressed Vietnamese identity based upon the memories of Vietnamese traditional architecture.
Recent publications:
Books
• "Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-Century Vernacular Modernism". Architecture Vietnam Books. 2020. International Edition. ISBN 9780578516585
• "Southern Vietnamese Modernist Architecture: Mid-Century Vernacular Modernism". Hanoi: Thế Giới Publishers. 2020. Vietnam edition (in English). ISBN 9786047778904
• “Vietnam” Chapter in the book Adventures in the Land of Modernism, published by the Modernist Society, Manchester UK, in July 2018.
• Editor: "Poetic Significance: Sài Gòn Mid-Century Modernist Architecture" by Pham Phu Vinh. Architecture Vietnam Books. 2021. International Edition. ISBN 9781087943374
Articles
• "The Largest Military Construction Project in History", The New York Times, 16 January 2018
• "Opinion: Saigon’s Architecture Should Reflect Our Times Today, Not the Past", Saigoneer, 17 May 2017
• "How Vietnam Created Its Own Brand of Modernist Architecture", Saigoneer, 28 December 2016
• "Breeze house", Architect: The Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 6 April 2016
Forthcoming research:
Mel Schenck is currently researching Vietnamese contemporary architecture, leading to a preliminary conclusion that Vietnamese architects are leading the world in the design of small structures in the information age. When viewing the parade of modernist houses every day on the architectural websites, viewers are commenting that Vietnamese structures look different, even if they can’t figure out why or how. Mel is analyzing these differences and is determining the principles of information-age architecture that Vietnamese architects are developing.
Mel had previously studied the economic and social basis of the Information Age in his Master’s thesis at the University of California at Berkeley in June 1981, entitled "Changing World View: Impact on Architecture and the Design for an Urban Library." Mel is currently researching the historical and philosophical reality of the Information Age, as well as the international principles of information-age design that follow from this philosophy. After developing the definition of the Information Age and its architectural principles, Mel will tie this to the contemporary Vietnamese architecture that fits the Information Age.