KVPT

The Patukva Agam restoration project gave back to the city of Patan and the world a rare architectural treasure, one of the handful of esoteric shrine buildings used by the royal priests, an architectural monument of international stature.

The building was in a ruinous state in 1992 when the project was identified. Without this initiative the building would certainly have been lost—its advanced state of disrepair justifying the owners' application to rebuild in 1991. Instead, a long process of negotiation was initiated which proposed careful in situ repair and subsidized the local contribution of the owners to achieve an international standard of building repair. The building notably remains in the hands of the priestly family that first built the structure. Thus in its restored state it can be used again for the religious rituals of this priestly clan resident in the adjacent courtyards.

Conceptually, the project is an important precedent in preservation in Nepal for a number of reasons. First, owned by a religious confraternity or guthi, it is one of the first semi-private monuments to be restored with international assistance. Until now international attention has only concentrated on government-owned or public buildings, ignoring the hundreds of threatened A-class monuments under semi-private (guthi or sangha) or private ownership. For this special case, the project developed a model tripartite agreement between the owners, KVPT and the Department of Archaeology, a framework which both protected it in the future and allowed turn-key implementation by KVPT. Contributions and agreement stipulations also included a substantial local contribution of approximately $5000.

Secondly, the project, at the time of inception, stood outside the delineated World Heritage Site. The rallying of funds for a structure which stood just outside the boundary line, i.e. an unlisted monument, was an important precedent for international attention to historical buildings which are key to the understanding of Nepalese heritage but are until now unprotected.

Thirdly, the seismic strengthening of this monument introduced a new approach to protecting the fragile masonry structures of Nepalese architecture. Instead of rebuilding the walls, the existing masonry structures were left untouched wherever possible and a new reinforcing, "back-up frame," somewhat like an interior scaffolding, was introduced on the interior. Previously, all seismic strengthening measures in Nepal had introduced concrete ring beams into the existing wall fabric.