He sees a network of high-rise buildings fanning out from the bridge on the far side, transforming the shanties and billboards that line the bank into a city of tomorrow. He came up with an elegant solution - building the bridge on piles over the river, accessed by a wide spiral ramp.
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Visiting the Basson ship-yards along the Saigon River, Khanh put his mind to a problem that had plagued city planners for well over a decade: how to bridge the river and develop the far bank without shutting down the city's port. With large projects came big responsibilities, and Khanh started feeling that ofthe fun and innovation were getting lost along the way. In recent years his firm, Quasar Khanh International, has become involved in larger projects, participating in building the huge Daniel Johnson dam on the Mani-couagan River in Quebec and designing a building complex for the Grande Arche de La Défense outside Paris. "The sky was the limit - at that time anything was possible," Khanh recalls. He also designed a line of inflatable furniture and a plexiglass cube-car during this period. The bra was solid silver, hung from a collier, and under that it was molded plastic."įor an encore he offered a matching nightgown with built-in fluorescent lights. "I like sculpture," Khanh says by way of explanation. He caused a stir at a club called New Jimmy's with some of his designs, like a dress mold-ed almost entirely of transparent plastic. KHANH'S daring catapulted him onto the international design scene in Paris in 1960 when he and his wife, Emmanuelle, a model, launched a line of clothes. "I should have been American," he adds."I really admire people who dare."
"I like to break down barriers," he says. Throughout his career, Khanh has made a point of defying norms. He took the name Quasar while in his 20s because, he says, it suggested something modern and universal: As a Vietnamese exile in France, he was searching for an identity unfettered by nationality. His father, an engineer, had died during the construction of the Haiphong port before he was born.įollowing in his father's footsteps, Khanh graduated from France's elite school for engineers, the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, but then veered away from civil engineering and into the world of fashion and design. Born Nguyen Manh Khanh in Hanoi in 1934, he was taken to France by his mother at age 15. In fact, Khanh chose fairly recently to come back to Vietnam. The tile roof rises to a peak over old wood beams the air conditioners have been replaced by ceiling fans.Īir conditioning? "Who needs AC?" Khanh says. Computerized appliances stare out of the open kitchen as a gecko scurries toward a skylight. Stone and iron Buddha figurines line a wall of the living room, facing spartan wood and bamboo furniture of his own design. Khanh's house, like his work, is an odd blend of high- and low-tech.
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