Moving Through the Mangrove: A Thu Thiem Fish Market Organised Like a Coastal Forest

Most fish markets are built like warehouses: a grid of columns, a single roof, aisles laid out for throughput. Moving Through the Mangrove rejects that logic and asks what a market would feel like if it were organised like a mangrove forest instead. Its answer is a building of drifting canopies, scattered stems and curving paths. Here, buying seafood, eating, gathering and simply wandering become parts of a single landscape experience rather than separate transactions.

Designed by Yuan Zhang, Xue Gao and Yu Pei, the project received the People's Choice Award in the Street City Vietnam competition. The site sits in Thu Thiem, the fast-developing district across the Saigon River from Ho Chi Minh City's historic centre. In that context, the team treats the fish market as an ecological and civic destination. It is a place where local trade, food culture, transport, sightseeing and public life meet at the water's edge.

Canopies That Float Like Islands of Foliage

From above, the market reads less as a building than as a cluster of vegetation. Oval canopies of different sizes and heights overlap without fusing into one continuous roof. Their perforated, mottled surfaces recall sunlight breaking through mangrove leaves. The aerial view also shows a curving bridge that reaches across toward a riverside park, so the market is drawn outward into the landscape rather than sealed off from it.

The fragmentation matters. A single roof would declare an inside and an outside. A field of canopies lets shade pool where it is needed while keeping sightlines open to the waterfront, the public spaces and the skyline. The designers borrow the mangrove's way of filtering light and do not simply copy its silhouette, and that distinction is what keeps the metaphor from tipping into kitsch.

A Market Hall Navigated Like a Canoe Route

Inside, the team's central image comes into focus: crossing the market should feel like travelling through a mangrove by canoe. The interior rendering shows fish stalls, shoppers in conical hats and lanterns hanging beneath the canopy above a pink floor. Spaces widen, narrow, curve and reconnect instead of running in straight aisles. The supporting columns abandon the structural grid. Their apparently irregular placement echoes the scattered trunks and roots of a mangrove stand.

This looseness suits the programme. A market's circulation is shaped by browsing, bargaining, food preparation, temporary stalls and chance encounters, so no single prescribed route will ever hold. By letting columns punctuate space rather than regiment it, the design makes movement exploratory and less institutional. The building reads as something to drift through, not a corridor of counters.

A Low Canopy That Hands the Lawn Back to the City

Seen from the surrounding lawn, the low circular canopy behaves almost like a pavilion in a park. Picnickers settle on the grass, a street vendor works the edge and hot air balloons hang in the sky above. The image makes clear that the market's influence does not stop at its stalls. The shaded edge extends the civic life of Thu Thiem's emerging waterfront and creates room for informal activity that a conventional market hall would push to the curb.

This is where the project's ambition beyond commerce is most legible. Positioned between a new urban fabric and the Saigon River, the market acts as a threshold, much as the mangrove itself occupies the band between land and water. The architecture takes on the ecosystem's role as an in-between zone where many kinds of life overlap.

Eight Furniture Types for an Ecosystem of Uses

The axonometric series catalogues eight furniture types, ranging from movable seating and ribbon seating to a conveyor belt vendor space and terrace steps. Diversity is the point. A mangrove thrives because it supports many species in close relationship, and the market applies the same thinking to how people sit, linger, sell and watch.

Treating furniture as a designed system rather than an afterthought gives the open canopy field real usability. The conveyor belt vendor space in particular hints at how trade and spectacle could merge. Terrace steps and ribbon seating turn circulation edges into places to pause. Together these pieces carry the project's stated priorities of adaptability and interconnected systems down to the scale of the body.

Stacked Layers, From Basement Service to Shading Roof

The exploded axonometric reveals the order beneath the organic surface. Roof, public access, zone arrangement and service circulation are pulled apart as distinct layers, rising from the basement to the canopy. The fluid public experience depends on a disciplined stack below it, with servicing separated from the spaces where visitors wander.

This is the diagram that makes the metaphor credible. A fish market carries heavy logistical demands, and the freedom of the ground-level experience only works if deliveries, storage and service routes are resolved elsewhere. Like a mangrove's hidden root network, the infrastructure does the structural work out of sight so that the visible landscape can stay open and loose.

Why This Project Matters

Mangroves are among Vietnam's most distinctive native landscapes. They shelter aquatic species and sustain coastal biodiversity, yet they have been pressured by intensive aquaculture, fish farming and coastal development. Placing the mangrove's identity inside a fish market is a pointed choice, because the building type is tied to the very industry that has strained these ecosystems. The project quietly asks visitors to connect the fish on the counter with the coast it came from.

More broadly, Moving Through the Mangrove shows that sustainable architecture can work as an organisational idea and not only as a technical checklist. Its canopies, columns, furniture and layered servicing all follow the same logic of adaptability, diversity and interconnection. For a district as rapidly transforming as Thu Thiem, that offers a convincing alternative to generic waterfront development: a public building that grows from local food culture and native landscape rather than imported typologies.

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Project credits: Moving Through the Mangrove Street City Vietnam (uni.xyz).