Under Ground: A Ho Chi Minh City Street Market That Turns the Cu Chi Tunnels Into Compression and Release

Most markets compete for attention with noise, signage and colour. Under Ground competes with a memory. It takes one of Vietnam's most loaded landscapes, the hand-dug Cu Chi Tunnels, and asks how their sequence of tight passages and sudden chambers might shape the ordinary act of buying bread, browsing a stall or sitting down for a meal. The answer is a market that commemorates through spatial rhythm rather than through plaques or displays.

Under Ground is a street market designed by landscape architect Dylan Ramage for a site in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The project was Shortlisted at Street City Vietnam. Its premise is direct: celebrate how the tunnels are used today, as an attraction and an educational experience, by building compression and expansion into every part of the market.

A Wartime Section Redrawn as a Street Corner

The project's opening collage stacks portraits, helicopters, a propaganda poster and a cut-away of the tunnel network beneath a band of tall grass. It is a dense image, and it makes clear the scheme is not borrowing the tunnels as a pleasant metaphor. The design abstracts their forms and uses: a network of narrow connections opening into multifunctional chambers, now known to most visitors through guided tours.

The aerial view shows how that abstraction lands on a busy corner lot. A low, curving structure wraps the base of a mixed-use block, its roof planted end to end, while a white dome sits half-buried in a garden at the street edge. Scooters stream past on both sides. The market reads as a soft ground plane pulled up and over the stalls, rather than as another building in a row of buildings.

Narrow Aisles That Break Into Courtyards

On the ground floor, the stalls are packed tightly beneath a dark ceiling clad in a hexagonal pattern. Walking between them is meant to feel like moving through a tunnel: narrow, enclosed, slightly dim. Then the plan releases you. A gravel bed and a single tree mark an opening where daylight drops through, and the white stall walls step back to form a small room around it. The tunnel's logic of passage and chamber becomes a shopping route.

The larger release is a courtyard where vendors and visitors can step out of the trading floor. Café tables sit under the edge of the patterned canopy, facing boulders, a broad old tree and white blossoming trees. The contrast between the low dark ceiling and the bright garden beyond is the project's thesis at its clearest: the pleasure of an open space depends on the tightness of the one before it.

Stalls With Two Faces

A market inspired by enclosure could easily turn its back on the street. Under Ground avoids this by making its edge stalls double-sided, so a vendor serves shoppers inside the market and pedestrians on the public sidewalk at once. At the northeast entrance, the hexagon-clad roof edge lifts over white column bays and the stalls spill toward the plaza, pulling passers-by under the canopy. Each stall is a compact three-by-three-metre unit, sized to suit a range of vendors.

The northwest approach takes the opposite tactic. Here a soft, vegetated entrance meets people arriving from the adjacent park and pedestrian bridge, with large stone pavers threading between boulders, clover-like groundcover and umbrella-shaped trees. The design separates a planted north from a structural south, letting the surroundings decide whether you enter through a garden or through a building front.

An Oculus Sunk Below the Garden

The most explicit tunnel reference is a subterranean dome placed near the pedestrian bridge. Inside, ribbed white panels converge on a circular oculus, and people sit on tiered steps around the edge. After the compression of descent, the only view is straight up to the sky. It is a room for rest and reflection, and it works because it gives the visitor nothing to buy and nothing to look at except light.

From the garden above, the dome barely registers: a pale shell among red shrubs, agave and blossoming branches, glimpsed at the end of a stone path. That discretion matters. The memorial gesture stays quiet at grade and reveals itself only to those who go below.

A Green Roof That Leaves Room to Grow

The ground floor is dense by design; the second level is its counterweight. A green roof wraps over the stalls and carries an informal stage and amphitheatre, open gathering space and a rooftop restaurant and bar oriented toward the Saigon River. White benches and black café tables sit under sculptural tree canopies, and the paving runs continuously so the roof can host performances one evening and loose seating the next.

This openness also makes the market incremental. Because the permanent stalls are compacted against the building, the roof and the open ground can absorb tent-booths and small vendor carts as demand grows, reached by a large elevator or escalator and stairs. At the restaurant, dark hexagon-patterned columns sweep up to a pale canopy, framing diners against the skyline at dusk. The roof is where the tunnel finally opens completely.

Why This Project Matters

Commemorative design often defaults to solemn objects set apart from daily life. Under Ground takes the harder route of embedding memory in something as routine as a market. Visitors may never read the concept, yet they will feel the squeeze of the aisles, the relief of the courtyard and the stillness of the oculus. That is a more durable way to carry history than any inscription, because it is experienced rather than explained.

The project is equally useful as a model for street trade. Double-sided stalls keep the sidewalk alive, a planted roof doubles as reserve space for informal vendors, and the adjacent mixed-use block places residents within reach of daily goods. Dylan Ramage shows that a single spatial idea, compression and expansion, can organise circulation, program and growth at once, and that a market can be both a place of exchange and a place to pause.

View the Full Project

Project team

Designer: Dylan Ramage

Competition and award

Shortlisted, Street City Vietnam

Location

Vietnam

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