Grills in Pause/Pulse is an experimental project investing the lingering feeling when observing the overlooked details of Vietnamese urban life. Drawing on Tran Hau Yen The’s Song Xua Pho Cu and Ilaria Coser’s The Marvellous Ironwork of the Windows of Vietnam, the work isolates a series of ubiquitous window grill motifs and translates them into endlessly looping moving motifs. These vernacular forms, typically encountered only in passing, are removed from their architectural context and represented as moving compositions that encourage sustained attention.
The project began as an experiment in coding a selection of window grill motifs as flat graphic drawings. These early iterations simply transitioned from one design to another, treating animation as a means of sequencing an archive.
Upon revisiting these early sketches, a shift in perspective emerged: rather than using animation as a way of recording an interpretation of the grills, movement became embedded within each motif itself. A line thickens almost imperceptibly; a circle gently oscillates; a curve slowly unfolds into a loop. The grills remain unmistakably architectural, yet they no longer feel entirely fixed. Through repetition, duration and subtle variation, their rigid geometry begins to reveal an unexpected rhythm.
Colours also became an extension of this transformation. Early iterations were rendered in white and grey, maintaining an almost diagrammatic neutrality. Later colours were sampled from the painted and sun-bleached façades of Hanoi, drawing on the saffron yellow of weathered walls, the shade of greens of timber shutters, and the crimson red that punctuate the city's ageing streetscape. These colours return traces of the city to the abstracted motifs, allowing them to carry not only the geometry of vernacular architecture but also its atmosphere. As the forms began to move, they also began to reconnect with the environments from which they originated.
