The past 5 years have seen staggering changes to Saigon’s architectural landscape. And the city's newest skyscraper, the Vietcombank Tower, will soon open for business on a prime piece of real estate overlooking the Saigon River. I’ve been watching admiringly as the tower has taken shape over the past few years. Impressive new buildings have been rare in Saigon’s 25 years of globalisation. So seeing a building go up that you might see in any world city feels like progress. Last week though, I took a closer look at the Vietcombank Tower from street level. It was less impressive. Its imposing style looks good from a drone, from across the Saigon River, or from an apartment tower in the distance. At street level though, where the building actually lives, it repeats a failing of many other major buildings around town. It rises out of narrow streets and gives nothing back in public space and public amenity. It’s an exclusion zone rather than a place that invites interaction. This is especially unfortunate in such a landmark location. The usual rationale for the skyscraper is - "build up so we can have more usable land for humans as well as green spaces at street level”. It makes sense. But so far, Saigon has only focused on going up. The public and green space parts of the deal have rarely been honoured. Few of the new skyscrapers around town give something back to their immediate neighbourhood. Vietcombank Tower was designed by US architects Pelli Clarke Pelli. The renderings of the building on the company website convey a much better relationship with the surrounding space than has been accomplished in reality. The basic problems are too much building, too little land and too little giving to the local environment. There's a tiny wedge of garden space with a rock feature at the building's entrance that is dwarfed by the tower it serves. These planning failures are not uncommon in fast developing cities. But they're difficult to undo. And Saigon seems to make new errors with each passing day - be it the destruction of heritage and low-rise shophouses, or a failure to create new public and green spaces to cope with the city’s bulging population. Poor planning decisions stay around for a very long time. The building in the foreground of this shot is the colonial era BGI brewery, which is located directly across the road from the new tower. It's in the process of being demolished.
