Sit in a Gothic abbey church built without cement or steel by a monk with no training
No cement, no steel, no drawings
A Cistercian abbey church of bare red brick, begun in 1939 and finished in 1945, on the road that runs towards Cuc Phuong National Park about 35 km from Ninh Binh city. The monastery itself was founded in 1936.
Why it's unique
The church was built without cement and without steel reinforcement, by a few dozen monks and local workers who moulded the bricks themselves. Its architect, Father Placido Truong Minh Trach, was a young monk who had never attended any school of architecture or building, and who worked with no model and no drawings, holding the whole design in his head.
The engineering is legible once you know where to look. The walls are 0.6 metres thick, thickening to 1.2 metres where the columns stand, which is what lets a 64-metre nave and a 21-metre vault stand up without steel, and is also why the church is warm in winter and cool in summer. An unreinforced load-bearing brick church of this scale, designed without drawings by an untrained monk and still sound eighty years on, is not a thing with an obvious parallel.
Before you go
The window treatment is the detail nobody notices. There are two tiers: wood-framed glass on the inside, and on the outside pierced openwork brick cut into pictures of the saints and of Christ carrying the cross, so the brickwork itself is the imagery.
This is a contemplative Cistercian house, not a visitor attraction. Monks are at prayer, silence is the rule inside, and access to the enclosure is restricted. Visits are made outside prayer times, roughly mid-morning and mid-afternoon, and the monastery closes to visitors entirely during Lent, the forty days before Easter. Assume you may see the church and the grounds and nothing else, dress conservatively, and do not photograph monks.
It is 35 km each way and you need your own transport. Combine it with Cuc Phuong, which is on the same road.