Viettel Academy Educational Center is in a training campus at Hoa Lac Hi-Tech Park, thirty kilometers from Hanoi. With classrooms, meeting rooms, halls, offices, and temporary housing, the center provides accommodation and training courses for the staff of Viettel, Vietnam’s largest mobile network operator.

Instead of concentrating the program in a single, large-scale volume, the building evokes the idea of a community and is organized in twelve main blocks that are four to five stories while the rest are two to three stories high. Designed as meeting areas for gathering and exchange, the spaces in between are covered with a rectangular concrete pergola that creates circulation spaces and gives the complex formal unity and geometric regularity. Besides, the roof provides shelter from strong tropical rains during the monsoon and helps reduce direct radiation from sunlight in the dry season. The twelve volumes are built with a forty-centimeter thick double skin of locally manufactured bricks in a red tone. These two layers provide depth and also a changing appearance depending on sunlight conditions, creating a harmonious atmosphere with nature.