From the 1930s onwards a number of Vietnamese architects graduated from the Archaeology Faculty of the École supérieure des beaux-arts de l'Indochine (Trường Cao đẳng Mỹ thuật Đông Dương) in Hà Nội. After 1954 many of these went overseas to study in the Soviet Bloc and an ever-increasing number of town planning experts from the USSR flew to Hà Nội to study the Vietnamese government's city planning problems and suburban housing needs. However, not until the 1960s were the first indigenous architectural colleges set up in Việt Nam.

Notwithstanding the growing Soviet architectural influence after 1954, many public buildings constructed during the late 1950s and 1960s continued to follow basic French architectural principles; typical of this period are the Ministry of Construction (Bộ Xây dựng) and Ministry of Industry (Bộ Công nghiệp) buildings in Hà Nội, both of which sit sympathetically with their immediate surroundings.

One of the most important pre-Reunification architectural projects in the north was the President Hồ Chí Minh Mausoleum, designed by Nguyễn Ngọc Chân and constructed between 1969 and 1975, which successfully combines Soviet-style realism with the simplicity of ethnic minority architecture.

The first Soviet-style redevelopment plan for the capital city of Hà Nội was drawn up as early as 1960, but this had to be shelved due to the outbreak of war. Of the second, the far-reaching Leningrad Plan of 1973 which would have created a new central business district on the southern and western banks of the West Lake, only the new airport at Nội Bài and the highway which leads to it were ever completed.

Meanwhile in the south, despite the failure of a grandiose plan for civic regeneration in Sài Gòn drawn up after 1945 by the ill-fated Diệm regime, the period 1945-1975 was marked y the construction of various buildings of architectural note. These included the Palace Hotel, designed by Lê Quý Phong; the National Library (now the Hồ Chí Minh City General Science Library, Thư viện Khoa học Tổng hợp Thành Phố Hồ Chí Minh, 1967) designed by Nguyễn Hữu Thiện and Bùi Quang Hanh; and perhaps most strikingly the Presidential Palace (now the Reunification Palace, Dinh Thống nhất, 1966) designed by Ngô Viết Thụ, one of Việt Nam's greatest architects, who was also responsible for designing the Huế University, Đà Lạt Market and Đà Lạt Nuclear Facility buildings.