Machado Silvetti Designs a Ground-Up University Campus
Architectural Record
Feature
News
Published
January, 2026
Tags
Vietnamese German University, Educational, Master Plans
Architectural Record has published a reported feature by writer Jennifer Krichels on the Vietnamese–German University, one of our most ambitious projects to date. Learn how we designed a fully realized university from scratch by reading the full story in Record, out now.
Outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Machado Silvetti Designs a Ground-Up University Campus Focused on STEM
Vietnamese Germany University Academic Clusters
Conceived as both an academic institution and a catalyst for national STEM development, the Vietnamese–German University campus about 30 miles outside of Ho Chi Minh City reflects the ambitions—and the challenges—of a rapidly transforming country. Funded through a World Bank grant and developed as a collaboration between the Vietnam Ministry of Education and Training and the German Hessen State Ministry of Science and Art, the public, state-owned university offers a dual Vietnamese–German degree, with a focus on science, engineering, and technology. After winning a 2014 international competition to design a ground-up campus for 12,000 students, Machado Silvetti’s task was not simply to create a master plan across 125 acres, but to give physical form to an emerging model of international academic partnership. Capitalizing on the expertise of German academic partners, the school aims to ready graduates for the rapid scientific and technological growth of Vietnam’s economy.
The 125 Acre Campus houses up to 12,000 Students
At the time of the competition, the rural landscape of Binh Duong Province offered little context for a university—surrounding land was an expanse of fields slated for development. Jeffry Burchard, partner at Machado Silvetti, explains, “We were creating an entirely new university campus in the middle of a placeless environment, well outside Ho Chi Minh City, which meant we needed to produce some kind of identity for the school at the campus scale.” Rather than replicate a traditional, inward-looking academic enclave, the architects sought to incorporate attributes of an urban environment through the density of buildings and proximity of different uses, “to produce the context that cities offer, which is lots of things nearby,” says Burchard.
The master planning project features laboratories, classrooms, food-courts, sports halls, administrative spaces, and dormitories.
Vietnamese-German University Food Court
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We designed a campus that seeks to lovingly linger in the collective mind of the community as an oasis of learning, a memorable and unique campus, an intelligent campus where the most advanced knowledge is imparted in the most appropriate and pleasurable of settings, a campus to which all will enjoy returning on a lifetime basis, from their formative years onward.
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Located in Binh Duong Province, Vietnam, this entirely new campus includes 3.5 Million square feet of facilities for all of the programs of a twenty-first century STEM university: laboratories, classrooms, food-courts, sports halls, administrative spaces, and dormitories for 12,000 students. Vietnamese-German University (VGU) was created from a unique collaboration between the World Bank, the Vietnamese Ministry of Education and Training, and the German Hessen State Ministry of Science and Art.
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