Bitexco Financial Tower

Bitexco is a glass tower in the first district of Ho Chi Minh City, finished in 2010 and for a short while the tallest building in Vietnam. The architect Carlos Zapata drew its tapering silhouette from the form of a lotus bud, and on the fifty-second floor he carried a helipad outside, so that it looks like a disc grown onto the body. A little lower, on the forty-ninth floor, works the Saigon Skydeck observation platform with a view over the bends of the river and the whole delta. The tower stands right up against the old low-rise blocks with their eatery signboards, and from street level that contrast is especially plain. Because of its height it is visible from almost any point in the centre.

On the map