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It was built during a period when patterned sunscreens had risen in popularity, drawing inspiration from Franco-Swiss architect Le Corbusier's use of "brise-soleil" - an architectural feature of a building that reduces heat within a building by deflecting sunlight.

At Galerie Quynh, which opened in 2003, I gushed over one of Trong’s works, a laser-cut facsimile of a brise-soleil, the sun-shielding patterned screens that you see everywhere in Vietnam, cut to the size of a window or an entire building’s facade.

A second photographer, the South African Alexia Webster, shot buildings in Ghana, like two university dormitories in Kumasi designed by the Ghanaian architect John Owusu Addo, their walkways shaded by geometric brise-soleil.

Having stayed in the Copan myself, I can testify that its brise-soleil – the screen of horizontal concrete sunshades that adds greatly to its external dynamism – comes at some cost to the flats inside.

The blue grid on the south side of the building adds not only color but also shade, in the manner of Le Corbusier's famous brise-soleil, or sun baffle.