Ngô Viết Thụ trained at Vietnam's Đà Lạt architecture school before continuing at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where in 1955 he became the first Vietnamese architect to win the Grand Prix de Rome, spending three years afterward at the Villa Medici. Returning to South Vietnam around 1960, he built for the state repeatedly through the decade — university campuses at Huế and Thủ Đức, an atomic research centre at Đà Lạt, and the palace commissioned after the 1962 bombing of its predecessor — combining a reinforced-concrete modern structure with facade screens stylised from traditional Vietnamese bamboo lattice-blinds and pagoda ornament. He continued to build into the 1990s and became, in 1962, the first Asian architect named an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Architects.
