You just never know what you’re gonna find in Saigon. The city has its own tempo. The city is its own nexus. Any time you leave home, you never know who or what you’re going to discover. Most recently it was meeting Hieu at Tempo Nexus at the corner Pasteur and Lê Lợi Street.
I parked across the street, walked to the apartment, found a guy snoozing by the door, pink walls everywhere on the way up, smiles radiating from residents inside their rooms. Moments later I arrived. Third floor. A stunning diamond shaped skywell opened up to the blue sky. I looked across and saw a guy tending to the plants in front of the doorway numbered 306. The paint stands out. It’s a similar combo to HÔM Cafe, a light pink and sharp mint. That’s the place.
I’m expecting a cafe. What I get is a reading room. More specifically, a workspace for Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc (Architecture Excursions), a research project on Vietnam's architectural heritage system with seven founding members from different fields, including architecture, anthropology, art, history and tourism.
Two guys are sitting at the table, they look up for a moment and return to their work. Hieu, one of the founders who stems from the anthropology field, shows me around, makes me a glass of daisy and artichoke tea, and I join the other two at the table. I say hi, take a sip of tea and soon forget it’s there. I’m completely consumed in learning about the place I just came across. This isn’t a cafe in the commercial sense, at least not yet. They’re still looking for staff. It’s purely a reading room right now — a surprisingly quiet workspace considering its central location.
“Are all these books yours?” I ask. “Yes, they’re from our research,”
Hieu answers. Since 2019, Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc has been archiving data on disappearing structures in Vietnam, collecting stories from different groups of residents, and doing everything they can to spread love for Vietnamese culture and art.
The room is old but charming. Hieu says it was built in 1954. The tile on the floor has been the same for the past 70 years but the room itself was renovated by K59 Studio about a year ago. He also tells me the upstairs area was built in later on when the family of five who used to live there eventually moved elsewhere.
The mint paint is beautiful. The door frame. The window frames. The shelves. The ladder. It’s all very easy on the eyes. Hieu tells me that color was common in Saigon in the 1960s. In fact, when they were renovating the place they scraped all of the paint off to find the walls dressed in the same color. To bring the past to the present, they used that color in the aforementioned items and added white paint to open up the space. Peeling back layers, bringing the past to the present, preserving heritage, is exactly the type of work Hieu and the rest of the crew works on at Tempo Nexus.
Tempo Nexus has two parts to it. Tempo stems from the idea of temporality. Essentially, the relationship between humans and time. Nexus meaning connection comes from the original owners of the building. They wanted to connect and bring people to this room. The room is like an observation point of the city, Hieu tells me, a place to observe what once was, what is changing in the city, and what will become of it as time passes.
Hieu pulls a book off one of the shelves, “This is our book. We’re working on a second right now.” The cover reads, Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc Nam Bộ (Southern Architecture, A study of Southern civil architecture from the late 19th to the late 20th century). Hieu directs me to the research collective’s website which includes various articles related to their research split into two parts: Tản Mạn and Kiến Trúc. Hieu explains the former section is more casual, the latter, more technical. According to the site, 87% of the people interested in their Vietnamese heritage research are between the ages of 18-34. Lastly, I learned the group also does workshops traveling around sharing their research and love of Vietnamese heritage in all its different ways.
The big goal with the books, the website, the workshops, and now the workspace in District 1 is all about bringing people together to collaborate, share, and learn. With Tempo Nexus, Tản Mạn Kiến Trúc has just that. If you’re interested in checking it for yourself, park at 55 Lê Lợi Street, walk to the apartment block at 130 Pasteur, travel up to the 3rd floor, and you’ll see number 306 above the mint doorway within the stunning pink diamond shaped skywell. Venture inside. Say hello. Grab a book. Take a seat or stand out on the balcony and observe all that was, all that’s changing, and all that’s still to become. The city is its own nexus. The city has its own tempo. You just never know what you’re gonna find in Saigon.
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