KVPT’s Patan Darbar Earthquake Response Campaign - Work to Date - September 2016

order to help the many local and international groups
now taking on other preservation projects.
Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust’s
Patan Darbar earthquake response campaign
Overview
The Trust’s work continued for over a year at a ‘fire
drill’ pace to meet emergency conditions created by the
earthquake. With a number of rebuilding and restoration
projects and many fundraising efforts by necessity
already underway, we only more recently could take
stock and look ahead to the next few years, to create a
master plan.
The Patan Darbar Earthquake Response Campaign is
taking shape. The five-year campaign will consist of 20
to 25 brick and mortar restoration and reconstruction
projects which we are expanding with initiatives for documenting
and sharing our work. At present, the Trust
has begun to develop planning and funding for 12-14 of
our own Phase I brick and mortar projects, and is providing
technical assistance for one of three other projects
initiated by the Nepal Government as well as coordinating
with the Austrian Government’s project at the Royal
Palace’s Keshav Narayana Cok. Nearly all projects are
in the central Patan Darbar ensemble, and the rest are
key sites nearby. Several projects address earlier KVPT
restorations damaged in the earthquake; most are iconic
structures where we are working for the first time due to
earthquake damage. These and perhaps ten more potential
Phase II projects which are under review are listed in
the Appendix, with a key plan and thumbnail photos.
This list, shown as of June, 2016, is evolving.
Documenting the preservation process and
the historical moment
The initiatives to plan and better support our project
work, and to share knowledge, begin with our 2016 review
mission and the publication of the present volume.
As there are insufficient resources on the national level,
or other expert entity to do it, KPVT considers it important
to our mission and contribution to the future of
Nepalese architecture to address the pressing and changing
needs in the Kathmandu Valley on an ongoing basis
by providing documentation of our work and hosting a
local and international dialog. Much work is in progress
and many design decisions have been made, but there
has been insufficient documentation in the past due to
the lack of manpower. There is a need to assess and analyze
the preservation process as well as techniques and
design. What is the level of authenticity of craftsmanship?
What are the varied perspectives on the issue of authenticity?
What preservation decisions are being made,
and how? What has been the interaction of craftsmen
and conservation architects and professionals? This work
is also a natural extension of our work over the past 25
years of keeping contact and exchanging project information
and techniques, as we have with past Japanese,
German, French, and Austrian project collaborations.
There has likewise been little analysis of the post-earthquake
situation on the ground, which has been chaotic
and extremely complex, with the Indian embargo,
no official permissions, local lobbying against seismic
strengthening, the complex political situation, scarcity
augmented by the blockade, the challenges of sourcing
materials, labor transport, fuel, etc.
On a positive note, a new sort of Royal Workshop of
Patan is alive, with historic building elements being sorted
and repaired by KVPT in the gardens of the palace.
With the multi-nation players involved, the controversies,
the byzantine official processes, these constitute an
extraordinary moment in the Kathmandu Valley’s architectural
history, when the documentation itself of the
times and the post-earthquake process (in the tradition
15