A Building to Remember
The queue was long. Longer than expected for a Saturday morning. My parents stood beside me. Their faces showed curiosity and fatigue. We came to see Ho Chi Minh's preserved body. The line snaked around the complex. All three of us had mobility issues. Legs and hips protested against standing. We didn't go inside. We walked around instead. Took photos with the building in the background. I thought about preservation. About keeping a myth alive. There's a song. "We're going down, down in an earlier round, and sugar, we're going down swinging." The line came to me standing there. It's a song about a failing relationship, about going down before the final fight, before you see how it ends. --- Built to Last The mausoleum demands respect. Massive. Gray. Imposing. Brutalist architecture in Soviet style, all concrete and stone, unadorned and unapologetic. Brutalist architecture is raw and honest, stripped of decoration. It doesn't try to be beautiful—it...