RISING STAR

The sky's the limit for Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam's booming metropolis, where stellar street food, historic alleyways and honking motorbikes now mix with shiny new skyscrapers, minimalist showrooms and upscale patisseries

-  JOSHUA ZUKAS

Arriving in Ho Chi Minh City for the first time can feel like a shock to the system. Decades ago, you might have spotted bicycles wobbling through lantern-lit streets and buffaloes basking in opaque waters, but today, the modern metropolis is rather different.

As your taxi crawls through the periphery, besieged by motorbikes, you'll encounter few cyclists and no fauna (save, perhaps, the odd pocket poodle). Instead, you'll cruise through hyperactive streets flanked by terraced houses with ground-floor neon shops. Occasionally, a glass-clad office or hotel will interrupt the carnival of mismatched nha ong or 'tube houses'.

These skinny buildings, which can be less than 3m wide and up to 12 floors tall, have popped up all around Vietnam as a result of limited building space and property tax policies. The only design consistency seems to be deliberate inconsistency; after all, Ho Chi Minh City is a city that pushes you to stand out.

Within Ho Chi Minh City's historic core, a sense of order emerges. In the early years of the colonial period (1862-1954), the French flattened much of the old city, founded around 400 years ago, and laid down a grid system that still gives structure to the city centre. Here you'll find the city's more storied architecture, such as the early 20th-century Jade Emperor Pagoda, a labyrinthine temple guarded by magenta walls, or Villa Le Voile, a flamboyant French mansion that is being turned into a cultural centre with help from restoration specialists Stonewest of London and Palazzo Spinelli of Florence.

Nearby is local architect Ngo Viet Thu's Independence Palace, completed in 1966 to replace a bombed French behemoth and now considered a paragon of Vietnam's postcolonial modernism. The style, a branch of tropical modernism, borrowed minimalist design ideas from elsewhere in the world and adapted them to suit Vietnam's heat and humidity.