TUBE houses on the lake --PHOTOS TAKEN WITH A NOKIA N82

ON the long, elevated Skyway-like road from the airport to the city proper of Hanoi, those narrow, tall houses can’t escape first-timers. They all have about three to four floors, with a veranda in each level. The roof is covered with European red tiles, or what we call tisa in our ancestral Hispanic houses. v The veranda, roofs, walls and windows use trapezoidal, zigzagged, geometric and jumbled shapes, using stainless steel, lacquer, inlaid wood and some aluminum.

At the city proper, this type of architectural uprightness greeted us and proliferated even in the central business district, surrounding the tall commercial buildings and some French colonial edifices. It seems building a bungalow or a two-story house is like committing a grave architectural mortal sin, given the facts that we would get into later.

A quick check on history would tell us that Vietnam was colonized by the French from 1887 to 1945. This explains why most designs evoke European influences, mainly from the Art Deco period, the “in thing” in architecture and design from 1925 to 1939. Deco is for decorative, infusing influences like cubism, futurism, neoimpressionism and all the “isms” that originated in the early part of the 20th century.

The French experience is also felt at the Intercontinental Westlake Hotel in Hanoi, where we were billeted for the launch of Nokia’s new four entry-level phones for the emerging market like Vietnam. Instead of having the usual high-rise, about 80 percent of the hotel’s rooms are spread on four-story edifices built and spread like floating structures on one side of the lake. It’s like recreating a portion of Venice.

In the three mornings I woke up earlier than usual, from the veranda of my room, I saw residents fishing right in front of their tube houses.

And I swear I didn’t notice a series of condominium buildings along the busiest streets.

I can’t help but compare the tall condo buildings rising left and right in Mega Manila’s major cities. Every day, we are awash in a flood of marketing campaigns exhorting us to pack our bags from the suburbs or our rickety two-floor apartment in Sampaloc to live the condo life. The Hanoians managed to preserve their heritage by sticking to the design that mirrors their history and culture.

Armed with a Nokia N82, which is equipped with easy photo and video-capture features, I was able to record a few architectural landmarks and some unique tube houses in Hanoi.

I learned later on that those tall and narrow residential structures exist because in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh, land is like gold. Our tour guide Phuk informed us that a square meter of prime land in the central Hanoi business district would cost as much as $15,000. If we’re going to go by Phuk’s assertion, that’s around P600,000 per square meter. Imagine, the price of a 54-square-meter, two-bedroom condo unit in Mandaluyong or Pasay City would only afford us about 5 to 6 sq m of land in Hanoi.

But Phuk could be exaggerating. In Ho Chi Minh City a prime lot in suburban residential areas would cost around $6,000 per sq m, based on the article “A New Side of Saigon” in the Vietnamese Airlines inflight magazine Heritage, March-April issue.

The existence of tube houses is also justified by the way Hanoian landowners are taxed, which is based on the width of their house’s façade. Therefore, people buy houses with narrow frontages to minimize tax burden.

Our quick online research also brought us to the report paper titled “Vietnam Real Estate Market: Policies for Demand Stimulation,” posted on www.mof.gov.vn, the official web site of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam’s Ministry of Finance.

It was reported that for the first quarter of 2008, land price in Hanoi’s urban districts has risen from Vietnamese Dong 54 million ($3,375) per sq m to VND67.5 million ($4,218) per sq m at maximum level, and VND1.5 million/sq m at minimum level.

Why the heart attack-inducing price? I an earlier report titled “The Fundamental of Real Estate Price,” it was cited how the migration of Vietnamese from the rural areas and the influx of foreign investors to cities like Hanoi resulted in a big demand for luxury-office buildings and, naturally, land prices. According to the Socioeconomic Development Research Institute of Vietnam, Hanoi will need about 100,000 apartments by 2010.

With this development, we can only hope that the tube houses will not vanish one by one, like bowling pins being toppled by the speeding balls of progress. At least, I captured them in pictures.

We can’t help but end this article with the sorry thought that if Hanoi has tube or tubular houses that they can be proud of, we only have “tubercular houses,” as best exemplified by the row of shanties greeting foreigners from the international airport. And no amount of makeup like the Metro Gwapo can remedy such prevalence.

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Good morning, tube houses

ON the long, elevated Skyway-like road from the airport to the city proper of Hanoi, those narrow, tall houses can’t escape first-timers. They all have about three to four floors, with a veranda in each level.