The Himalayan graveyard of starchitecture in Nepal

IN 2015, two devastating earthquakes hit Nepal, killing about 9000 people. The earthquakes, measuring 7.8 and 7.3 in magnitude, also destroyed the homes of some 500,000 people, with central Nepal suffering the most. Much of the damage involved buildings that were not constructed to withstand earthquakes or had been poorly maintained. In the aftermath, organisations working to rebuild in badly hit areas invited the celebrated Japanese architect Shigeru Ban to design resilient new housing for the Himalayan region..Nepal has a long history of earthquake-resistant architecture. Traditional buildings of the Gurung community in central Nepal are based on dry masonry combined with timber structures for the floors and roofs. The Lepchas of the eastern Himalaya build nine-pillar houses and other structures often raised off the ground. These styles have proven to be highly earthquake resistant..Ban had made a name for himself in post-disaster construction when he designed disaster-relief shelters in Christchurch after an earthquake hit New Zealand’s South Island in 2010. His quick-build community buildings had also helped rehouse survivors of natural disasters in Rwanda, Turkey, Japan, China, India and Haiti. His style focused on structural strength and the use of local materials, and he had famously developed construction material from cardboard tubes used in the Japanese carpet industry. He had also won the Pritzker Prize, considered the highest honour in architecture, just the previous year..Ban started his design work supported by his own Voluntary Architects Network and the Nepal-based Saraf Foundation. His team identified disaster-hit areas and recruited the local architect Sanjay Thapa. As Ban completed his concept design, magazines such as Domus, Architectural Review, Dezeen and ArchDaily ran articles on his “Nepal Project”, accompanied by 3D-rendered images of the prototype’s exteriors and interiors as well as plans with design details. Each house was to have connecting modular frames and the wall cavities in these frames were to be filled in with bricks salvaged from the earthquake rubble. Cardboard tubes were to form a trussing to support the roof. ArchDaily highlighted Ban’s claim that the simple design could be “easily assembled by almost anyone.”.Unfortunately, Ban’s design intentions fell far short of the actual construction possibilities and needs of the time. One problem, for example, was that the cardboard tubes in the design retained moisture in the mountains of Sindhupalchok district, one of the hardest-hit areas. The issue came to light when building a prototype, and the cardboard tubes had to be replaced with timber. For reasons unknown, the project never fully took off. Only two shelter homes were constructed in the disaster area, and one lonely demo house stands today on the grounds of the Hyatt Regency hotel in Kathmandu, a souvenir left behind by Ban..Like Ban, three other world-famous architects – or “starchitects” – have ventured into Nepal with ambitious designs that have failed to translate into inspiring contemporary architecture. Louis I Kahn, who built iconic structures in Ahmedabad and Dhaka, made his contribution to Kathmandu in the form of a modest health-ministry building. After his death, his original design principles were marred by the Nepal government’s imposition of its own aesthetic and practical considerations on the building. Tadao Ando and Rem Koolhaas, both also Pritzker Prize winners, have one building each in Nepal to their credit, but here again the completed structures fall far short of their renowned works elsewhere in the world. .NEPAL’S TRADITIONAL ARCHITECTURE has inspired many illustrious visitors, including the former US president Jimmy Carter. As quoted by the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust, Carter once said, “Anyone who has the opportunity to walk amidst these beautiful architectural antiquities will appreciate their importance, not only for Nepal, but for all of human civilization.” Carter was likely talking about the architecture of the Malla dynasty, which ruled from the Kathmandu Valley between 1201 and 1769. The style used timber, brick and stone to create intricate hybrid structures with elaborate struts and tiered roofs. When maintained properly, these structures have withstood hundreds of earthquakes, as can be seen in the many Malla-era palaces, temples and monuments that still survive inside and outside of the Kathmandu Valley..During the rule of the Ranas, hereditary prime ministers who exercised power between 1846 and 1951, the architecture of Nepal’s elite was inspired by central European palaces and European colonial styles, with an emphasis on symmetry, high windows and elaborate decorative plasterwork. .Nepal was virtually inaccessible for the outside world until the middle of the last century. With the opening up of the country’s borders in the 1950s, new architectural knowledge, new building materials and foreign architects started finding their way in. Robert Weise from Switzerland, Habib Rahman from India and Carl Pruscha from Austria are among many architects who contributed to the development of the contemporary architecture of Nepal in the 1960s and 1970s. They brought in fresh theories, new practices such as the increased use of glass in fenestrations, and design methods including modern professional architectural drawing – all of which influenced the young Nepali architects on their teams. .By the 1990s, the standard style of new construction in the Kathmandu Valley – the country’s largest and most influential urban centre – involved reinforced concrete frames with concrete and brick infill, as opposed to the earlier practice of raising structures on load-bearing brick walls. This development was welcomed by engineers and the building industry. The resulting concrete structures had brick walls thick and insulating enough to allow for comfortable interiors during the cold winters as well as during the hot summer days before the monsoon. .Himal shows you Southasia like no one else will. Become a Patron to support the magazine!.With the turmoil of the Maoist insurgency that spread across Nepal after 1996, the massacre of the country’s royal family in 2001 and a coup by the king in 2005, Nepal began to see massive migration to the capital in Kathmandu and other urban centres. As documented by the journalist Thomas Bell in his book Kathmandu, rapid urbanisation accelerated building activity in the capital and pushed down the quality of the average construction. Everywhere, Nepal’s urban centres were developing too quickly to allow for the creation of adequate urban design. Little value was assigned to creating inspiring contemporary architecture, and even less to debating how to create it..When Belgian billionaires Guy and Myriam Ullens wanted to build and extension for the Ullens School in Lalitpur, in the south of the Kathmandu Valley, they invited the acclaimed Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas to design the flagship building. The school’s founding was part of the work of their philanthropic Ullens Foundation, which wanted to make a contribution to local education. Koolhaas’ architectural firm, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), proceeded with the design work and hired a local architect, Arun Pant. .Most Koolhaas buildings have a signature – a bold shape challenging the usual building-block layout. Some even seem to challenge gravity: like the headquarters of the Chinese broadcaster CCTV in Beijing, which is a 51-storey, angular, continuous loop of glass and steel. Koolhaas is also known for bold choices of material, as in the design of the Kunsthal, an art space in Rotterdam, with its tree-trunk columns and bright orange inverted roof beam..The completed Ullens School building lacks the qualities of boldness and innovative design that have made Koolhaas and his structures so famous. If there are prominent features at all, they would be the building’s vertical glass-block staircase and a few interior spaces with lowered window sills, which provide ample views and allow in lots of daylight. The building has not been celebrated by the OMA or the architecture community in Nepal..IN 1995, THE famous Japanese architect Tadao Ando won the Pritzker. Ando donated his prize money to victims of the Great Hanshin Earthquake, which killed more than 6000 people in the region of the Japanese city of Kobe that year. Among the medical aid workers attending to the victims were several Nepali doctors from the Association of Medical Doctors of Asia (AMDA). Around that time, Rameshwor Pokharel, a pediatric surgeon and the founder and former director of the Nepal chapter of AMDA, decided to build a women and children’s hospital in Butwal, in the south of the Nepal because he was distressed by high levels of infant mortality in country. .Pokharel convinced the Nepal government to donate land. Tadao Ando joined the project and offered to design the hospital pro-bono. It was Ando’s first venture in Nepal and also his first hospital design. The construction was funded partly by victims of the Hanshin Earthquake and partly via a campaign by the popular Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun, as an expression of gratitude to Nepali doctors for their contributions in the aftermath of the earthquake..The first block that Ando designed was the out-patient department of what would become the Siddhartha Children and Women’s Hospital (SCWH). He quickly realised that on this project he would not be able to pull off structures with his signature style of smooth finished concrete. In the online architectural catalog Architectuul, Ando wrote that the two main problems were cost and the available local technology, which meant the hospital “became a facility that has a slightly different expression from the buildings I have completed so far.” He designed a colonnade for the west facade that would provide shelter from harsh sunlight, and settled on using exposed walls of locally manufactured brick for the exteriors, with the interiors in brick and mortar with a white paint finish. Ando then left the project. Two local architects, Kishore Thapa and Mira Gyawali, who had already been involved in the SCWH project, continued without Ando to design a separate maternity ward. .The first part of the hospital complex, including the OPD, which was constructed in 1998, is characterised by a modernist cuboidal massing. The hospital’s outer brick facades now appear unintentionally weathered by the region’s annual monsoons. The interiors lack both sufficient natural light and natural ventilation. .When the American architect Louis I Kahn unexpectedly passed away in New York in 1974, several of his Southasian projects were under construction. Among these were the National Assembly complex in Dhaka, the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad, and the Family Planning and Maternal Child Welfare building in Kathmandu for Nepal’s health ministry. Kahn’s project in Nepal was commissioned at a time of several endeavours in the country by architects of grand international repute; Kenzo Tange had been awarded the design of the Lumbini Master Plan, for the development of the birthplace of the Buddha, in 1972. The financing for Kahn’s building in Kathmandu was facilitated by the US Agency for International Development, while Tange was paid by the United Nations Development Program. .Kahn had started to develop a master plan for the government institutional zone in central Kathmandu, which included the Family Planning and Maternal Child Welfare building. It was to have two connected isometric blocks, with a facade of exposed brick and deeply recessed vertical windows for shading. The balance of accentuated horizontal lines in the brickwork with the verticality of the larger composition is the work of a master. The building, in its original design, rose to parapet walls at the roof level punctured with square apertures intended to frame the sky. .Kahn’s ethos involved spending ample time in Southasia and ensuring his presence on work sites to see his design carried through in construction. But, after he died, the health ministry decided against building the western half of the design, and only the eastern half was constructed. The bureaucrats also decided that the exposed brick facade was not finished without paint. An even greater architectural disaster occurred in 1995. Citing roof leakage and a space crunch, the health ministry opted to construct an additional floor on the roof. The frames-to-the-sky in the roof parapet were converted to windows, and the structure was topped off with a sloping roof of corrugated steel whose only virtue was that it was cost-effective. Kahn’s orthogonal composition, with clean horizontal and vertical lines, was desecrated. Even public outcry and legal challenges from architects and cultural organisations that wanted to preserve Kahn’s legacy could not prevent this. The structure now houses Nepal’s ministry of health and population..BAN, KOOLHAAS, ANDO and Kahn are celebrated for a wide array of projects worldwide, but their endeavors in Nepal have barely resonated with the local context and public or created an echo in the architecture community inside or outside the country. The Nepali architect Biresh Shah, one of the best minds in the field of contemporary architecture in Nepal, wrote for the magazine Spaces in 2016 about the works of internationally renowned architects contracted by international organisations to design buildings in Nepal. Most such projects “were single project involvement within a limited time frame,” he noted, and they rarely demonstrated “innovative efforts by the architects in a new challenging context.”.Why were the starchitects unable to pull off their Nepal projects and enrich the country with exemplary designs? Were they unable to spend enough time understanding the unique context of Nepal’s terrain and culture? If one of the problems was the framing of the assignments by the projects’ patrons, future debacles may be prevented if patrons consult more closely with local experts, such as the Society of Nepalese Architects and the Kathmandu Institute. .The failure of the starchitects – and especially the violation of Kahn’s design – also raises larger questions about how much contemporary architecture is valued in Nepal. Ten years ago, Nepal had three magazines of architecture: SPACES, praXis and Business Architecture. None of these survive anymore in print or online. The English-language weekly Nepali Times sometimes carries a meaningful spread related to contemporary architecture, planning or the built environment, but these are exceptions in the country’s media. Is architecture not on the radar in Nepal anymore, or does Nepali architecture in the popular mind only refer to the rich architectural heritage of the past?.Yet there seems to be enough curiosity about contemporary architecture among young Nepali architects, architecture students, engineers and environmentalists. The 2024 exhibition ‘Modern Encounters in Architecture: Kathmandu Valley (1945-1985)’, hosted at the Taragaon Museum in Kathmandu, saw many visitors, and its accompanying book, edited by Shah, is already considered a seminal document. The Mountain Architecture Dialogue, a 2023 event in Lalitpur, was packed with hundreds of visitors for two consecutive days. (Disclosure: Anne Feenstra, one of the authors of this article, was an organiser and host of the Mountain Architecture Dialogue.) The event deliberately focused on good practices in contemporary architecture that are sustainable and suited for the mountainous terrains of Nepal. .Where starchitects have faltered, some local designers have thrived. The innovations of the architect Gangadhar Bhatta and the engineer Shankar Nath Rimal are part of Nepal’s modern architectural legacy because they successfully adapted new shapes, structures, spatial configurations and materials to fit the Nepali context. .We witnessed the awe that Rimal’s work can evoke when, in February 2024, we took students from South India to see the Pangre Ghar, or “Wheel House” – once the residence of Khagda Bahadur Singh in Lalitpur, and now occupied by Tribhuvan University. As they stood outside the walled compound, the students could see only the two top storeys of the building, with their modernist, minimalist horizontal bands of plasterwork and glass – and they wondered what made the building special. As the gates opened, they were amazed to see the structure balance on two large concrete wheels. The Pangre Ghar stands as one of the best examples of modern Nepali architecture.