The population of Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), one of fastest growing cities in Asia, has
population was doubled shortly in just a 10-year term, and this has created the development of
many housing types providing for citizens with different lifestyles. The paper aims to primarily
investigate houses in the city and shows their typical types in terms of identity, characteristics
and typology with our own pictorial information and then find their relationship with
ventilation. There are five housing categories, namely: tube house, apartment, rental house,
slum house and rural house and were distinguished according to some factors. The rental house
is the house type with many inadequate ventilation characteristics such as no opening
door/windows as outlets to outside, no exhaust fans at all, no system of ventilators in wall while
the rural house with multiple air gaps to outside is completely opposite.
These typologies have been used in order to build a sample of representative HCMC housings,
to be studied in details with intention to put in light the ways of improving their ventilation, and
so avoid indoor air pollution.