Park Life 3.0

While public parks emerged in the 19th century, offering democratized leisure and ordered nature for increasing, industrializing populations, their role in this century is considerably more complex as urban intensity further soars. Today, parks are evolving into problem-solving pieces of infrastructure, providing crucial flood management and cooling microclimates, protective corridors for pedestrian and cycle lanes, and paths of survival for wildlife.

In Ho Chi Minh City, LAVA had the opportunity to rethink the 16-hectare Central Park for this new era alongside a young team of Ho Chi Minh-based architects and ASPECT Studios, one of the largest Australian landscape architecture firms. The forecourt of a grand French colonial 19th-century railway station—the first in Southeast Asia—Central Park has evolved into a major transportation hub featuring a bustling bus terminal and future metro hub, buzzing with social and commercial activity all day and night.

Informed by French colonial rule, many of Vietnam’s parks are imprinted with formal avenues and rose gardens modeled on Versailles. However, in our experience, Ho Chi Minh is anything but formal.

Our competition-winning redesign respects and reframes 19th-century history to transform the park’s humdrum strip into an active vessel tailored to Vietnamese contemporary life, climate, and future mobility. As a considered decision combining engagement with local culture and expert international knowledge, history isn’t demolished or erased: the redundant relics of rusty railway tracks slicing through the park are now renewed with rigorously measured, socially-informed purpose, guiding a master plan of gently layered, elevated pedestrian pathways and curving undulating ramps which culminate in twisting steel sculptures as imaginative acknowledgments to afflictive histories.