A 1988 photograph by Crawford of the A1 Giang Vo apartment block. It featured in two exhibitions, "Hanoi 1985–2015: The Forgotten Years" and "Past and Present: The Changing Streets of Hanoi", held in April 2023.
Images of these collective housing areas frequently appear in works by both Vietnamese and international photographers and are often shared in online groups dedicated to memories of Hanoi to great public interest.
These buildings stand as testimony to the city’s social transformation during various historical periods.
According to researcher Tran Hau Yen, collective housing was both a remarkable achievement and a major construction milestone in the early peaceful years in northern Vietnam after 1954.
Born 1949, Crawford first visited Hanoi in 1985 and returned many times afterward to photograph street scenes and everyday life, hoping to document the capital’s transformation and development.
Steinhauer, born 1966, has lived and worked in Asia since 1993. Early in his career, he focused on portrait photography before turning his lens toward urban architecture, man-made structures, and natural landscapes.
His works are included in the collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art in the U.S, the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and numerous private collections around the world.
Hanoi’s old collective apartment blocks are among Steinhauer’s favored subjects. He believes these will be demolished over time to make way for new high-rise developments and so has sought to document them through photographs, preserving what he sees as an important architectural and cultural imprint of the capital.
Steinhauer photographed the Giang Vo housing complex in 2016. Earlier, during his time in Hanoi from 1993 to 1997, he devoted much of his attention to observing and documenting daily life in the city’s aging collective apartment blocks.
A view of the housing complex captured through Steinhauer’s lens. In the heart of a modern city, the aging apartment blocks stand somewhat anachronistically amid the rapid pace of urban life, exuding a sense of quiet calm. But admittedly, many of these buildings have deteriorated over time.
Steinhauer said once he was struck by the 50-year-old architecture and by how many had extended their homes by a few square meters with makeshift additions known as “tiger cages”.
