Nội-Hà Mégaforme: Fusing an Old and New Bridge into an Inhabitable Piece of Hanoi

Most bridges ask one thing of the people who use them: get across. Nội-Hà Mégaforme asks them to stay. The project takes Hanoi's historic colonial bridge, sets a new bridge alongside it, and fuses the two into a single inhabitable urban artifact. The result layers transportation, landscape, public space, culture and recreation over the river. It treats adaptive reuse as something that can operate at the scale of infrastructure, and not only at the scale of a single building.

Designed by Khanh Duong Pham, the proposal was recognized as an Editor's Choice entry in UnIATA '21. Its premise is that preservation can mean more than conserving physical fabric. Rather than keeping the old bridge at a respectful distance or leaving it as a traffic corridor, Pham uses it as the skeleton for a new piece of city. The historic structure stays legible, but it no longer works alone: platforms, circulation routes, structural layers and programmes gather around it. Heritage here is occupied and extended, not frozen.

Reversing the Name: From a City Between Rivers to a River Inside the City

The project's central argument begins with a play on words. Pham reads Hà-Nội as a place located "inside" or "between the rivers," and reverses it into Nội-Hà, the "river inside." The inversion is small, but it carries the whole proposal. The river stops being a boundary that separates urban territories and becomes a space the city can occupy. The opening renders make the point well. In daylight, a long, low building with pitched roofs stretches across a reedy shoreline under a peach sunset; at night, the same mass sits on dark water while red beams rise into a moonlit sky. Neither image reads as a bridge in the usual sense. Both read as a settlement that happens to span water.

The move carries extra weight because of the scale of Hanoi's river landscape. Vegetation, islands, cultivated land and water fill large areas between dense urban districts. The bridge is one of the few linear elements that passes straight through these contrasting conditions, and Pham treats that crossing as an architectural opportunity rather than a gap to clear as fast as possible.

Stacked Floors on Inherited Piers

The paired sections show how the megastructure is built. Stacked floors sit high above the ground, held in place by slanted struts that rise from concrete piers set into red ground. The diagonal bracing gives the new building a clear structural language that stands apart from the older infrastructure it rests on, which keeps the two layers distinguishable instead of blurring them together. This is where the old-bridge, new-bridge idea becomes concrete. The project does not hide the inherited structure beneath new cladding. It builds a section that reads as accumulation, one system placed on top of another.

Red Portal Frames Over Open Water

Seen in perspective from the water, the building shows a slatted facade and a run of red portal frames reaching out over a pink river, with a motorboat and birds passing beneath towering clouds. The slats filter light and views without closing the structure off from its setting, and the repeated red frames give the long elevation a steady rhythm. The drawing frames the structure as something experienced from below and from the river surface as much as from the deck. This supports the larger claim that the river is inhabited, not simply crossed.

A Train Hall and a Swimming Pool Inside the Bridge

The interiors show how far Pham pushes the programme. One drawing shows a long station hall where a red train waits among diagonal struts, with an escalator and a few figures standing on the platform. Mobility stays central here; the project begins with movement and does not drop it. The urban strategy diagrams back this up. Under the first strategy, Unload, the proposal looks at relieving pressure on the city centre by rethinking major transportation flows, rather than funnelling movement through a few congested routes.

The second interior turns in the opposite direction. A swimming pool marked with red lane lines sits beneath a black roof of steel beams, with a single figure seated at its edge. Placing a pool inside infrastructure states the project's ambition plainly. The structure that carries trains also supports slow, recreational occupation, and the same heavy structural vocabulary appears in both rooms. Fast and slow uses share one frame, which is exactly what the proposal means by turning infrastructure into public realm.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive reuse is usually discussed through buildings: warehouses that become galleries, factories that become housing. Nội-Hà Mégaforme applies the same logic to a bridge. It treats the engineering value, history and visual identity of colonial infrastructure as a foundation to build on, not an object to fence off. In doing so, it presents preservation as an active, ongoing process in which the old structure is remembered, used and extended all at once.

The proposal also offers a clear spatial argument about how a city can relate to its river. By reading Hà-Nội as Nội-Hà, Pham recasts the water as territory rather than obstacle and shows what that shift could look like at the scale of a single linear structure: a station hall, a pool and a facade set over open water. It is an ambitious megastructure, but its strongest idea is simple. A bridge does not have to be a line between two banks. It can be a place.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Khanh Duong Pham

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Project credits: Nội-Hà Mégaforme by Khanh Duong Pham UnIATA '21 (uni.xyz).