PAU Architects

Founded in 2018 by Trung Nguyen and Huyen Nguyen, PAU Architects is a Vietnamese practice based in Ho Chi Minh City that pursues architectural beauty through quietness and equilibrium. The firm specializes in architecture, interior design, landscape architecture, and construction, developing projects that emphasize the careful calibration of light, materiality, and human experience within slower, more contemplative spatial rhythms.

Under the leadership of co-founder and lead architect Trung Nguyen alongside creative director Huyen Nguyen, PAU Architects has established a distinct design methodology rooted in restraint and atmospheric sensitivity. The practice approaches each commission through extended dialogue, iterative refinement, and meticulous observation, allowing spatial concepts to evolve organically until they achieve what the firm describes as intrinsic vitality. The firm's work always speaks quietly, through the light on a wall, the surface of a material, or the peaceful area between spaces, rather than through expressive forms. Each project is formed over time, through conversations, adjustments, and careful observation, until the space becomes right and has its own life.

Rather than pursuing formal expression or visual prominence, PAU Architects positions architecture as a responsive medium that amplifies subtle environmental conditions such as shifting daylight patterns, material textures, and spatial thresholds. This philosophy manifests in projects where built interventions recede to enable deeper engagement with context, landscape, and vernacular life. Working within what they term productive silence, the firm maintains that architectural precision emerges not from detachment but from closer listening and contextual understanding, ultimately producing spaces that integrate naturally into daily existence rather than imposing predetermined formal agendas. Working in silence does not mean being slow or distant. For the firm, it is a way to be closer, to listen, to understand, and to allow architecture to become a natural part of life.

The firm believes that beauty comes from the balance between light, materials, and people, in a slow and natural rhythm of life. Through in-depth research on site specificity, innovative use of materials and temporality, and continuous exploration of context, PAU Architects has established itself as an important contributor to contemporary Vietnamese architectural discourse, creating works that are both environmentally responsive and maintain architectural excellence. Under the continued leadership of Trung Nguyen and Huyen Nguyen, the firm currently occupies a unique position in the Vietnamese architectural landscape, focusing on creating vibrant architectural spaces that integrate traditional wisdom with contemporary technology.