Track the work of Carl Pruscha across Nepal and Sri Lanka – take our architectural tour

So here I am in Sri Lanka, at the end of almost 20 days spent exploring the work of Austrian architect Carl Pruscha. I arrived on a red-eye flight out of New Delhi, stepping onto the island as the damp weight of tropical humidity settled over the coastline. My mind is still tethered to where this journey began: the high, crisp altitudes of the Kathmandu Valley. I have spent this time moving between the bookends of a single architect's life, from rounded brick monuments in the Himalayas to the floating minimalism of the tropics.

Who is Carl Pruscha?

Born in Innsbruck in 1936, Pruscha studied in Vienna and at Harvard. While working in New York in 1964, the UN appointed him as a planning expert adviser to the Nepalese government, which brought him to the region, and he set up a small architecture studio in Kathmandu. My own introduction to Pruscha’s work was accidental. I stumbled upon a striking brick complex in Kathmandu while working on post-earthquake reconstruction in 2018. The project, Taragaon Next – currently a private gallery and cultural hub – features brick floors that stretch into walls that curve into barrel-vaulted roofs. It felt ancient and hyper-modern all at once. I remember touching those walls and realising that to occupy an architect's pure vision is to step inside their mind.

Before my trip, I called Pruscha at his home in Vienna (he returned to Austria in 1974) to ask which buildings to prioritise seeing when in Nepal. ‘Just see Taragaon, don't go anywhere else,' he said. The problem with that is that the buildings pull you in – one leads to another, and another – until you find yourself piecing together a life spent building across three countries and 60 years from the fragments that remain. And I wanted to see it all.

Walking through Taragaon Next with its curator, Roshan Mishra, the subtlety of Pruscha's work becomes apparent. Built in 1972, the complex sits near the landmark Boudhanath temple, like a modern intervention next to the ancient titan. Doorways are intentionally low, a gesture borrowed from Newari tradition (the Newar are the indigenous people of the Kathmandu Valley). Lotus motifs etched in stone mark every threshold, while courtyards echo the sunken steps of temples in the nearby city of Bhaktapur. The building, originally commissioned by the Nepal Women's Association as a hostel, had an afterlife as a hotel, then a casino, then a project office for the Hyatt Regency next door, then a dead space until it was revived in its current form in 2010.

For the Centre for Economic Development and Administration campus at the nearby Tribhuvan University, Pruscha's exploration took a different form. Walking through the now-abandoned student hostels, I stepped onto the balconies and saw it: the building's terraces cascade down the hillside in a geometry that overflows directly into the adjacent agricultural terrace farms. No boundary between the two. The built environment and the ancient land art of Nepali farmers become a single, continuous landscape. ‘There is an effort to restore them,' local architect and academic Biresh Shah told me, but the decay is palpable.

When I asked Pruscha about the dramatic shift between his Nepali brick and his Sri Lankan steel structures on stilts, his response was almost impatient: ‘There is no ideological change. I am always the same person. If I design something in the US, in Nepal, in Sri Lanka, or even in Austria, it's always of the same spirit. The only thing is that the people are different.'

However, in Nepal, that spirit was under siege. His master plan for the Kathmandu Valley – protecting the agricultural heartland and temple towns – was not accepted by local elites protecting their real estate. His private homes are vanishing: the House at Bansbari is now a restaurant; the Rana Residence, as Shah confirmed with visible sadness, was demolished to make way for a hotel. ‘People didn't like brick buildings, they wanted everything in concrete,' another local architect, Saurav Shrestha, told me, echoing Pruscha's own frustration. Pruscha refuses to return. ‘I don't want to go back…' he told me. ‘I want to keep it in my memory as it used to be – a paradise in the 1960s.'

Sri Lanka, where he started working in 2005, demanded an entirely different architecture. ‘In Nepal, people still built using bricks because they weren't colonised,' Pruscha explained. ‘Sri Lanka was just the opposite.' Beneath centuries of colonial imposition, he saw a far older vernacular – buildings on stilts, lifted above the wet earth. His anchor here was Kathrin Messner, a Viennese intellectual who, with her late husband Josef Ortner, established the One World Foundation (OWF), a ‘social sculpture' inspired by Joseph Beuys. The income generated from the guesthouse that Pruscha built for them – the House Above Trees – funds a free school for more than 1,000 students. Pruscha didn't win this commission through a bidding process. ‘He came to visit because we were friends,' Messner told me. ‘He took out some paper and made a design.' The result was a school in the OWF and three bungalows. I got a chance to stay in all three, each one very different from the others, yet similar in principle.

The Lagoon Bungalow is made from steel pillars that lift the living space 2m into the air. Between the wooden ceiling and the corrugated roof, a 1m void acts as a passive thermal engine, the ocean breeze flushing the sun-heated air out before it reaches the rooms below. No air conditioning is needed. Materials dismissed across South Asia as the vocabulary of poverty, such as visible I-sections, steel pipes and corrugated iron, are elevated here into breathable elegance.

In December 2004, a devastating tsunami tore through its lightweight walls, but the structure held. ‘The building wasn't destroyed,' Pruscha told me. ‘We could repair it again.' The school was not so fortunate and was obliterated. Eva Schlegel, Pruscha's wife, organised an art auction, raising more than €250,000 in one evening. Pruscha then designed the replacement building on a 6m x 6m grid: cross-shaped columns, waffle-slab ceilings, walls stopping 1m short of the roof for cross-ventilation. The Sri Lankan minister of construction declared that every tsunami-destroyed school should follow this design, and the Austrian ambassador pledged to donate money. None were built.

On one of my final days in Sri Lanka, I walked around the House Above Trees as the team working on its yearly maintenance finished sealing the floorboards. The coat hadn't fully cured, and with every step the timber gripped at my shoes – the house, freshly maintained, asserting itself against my departure. Through the open lattices, the Indian Ocean stretched to the horizon. I could imagine the school's principal resuming the term and training the 1,000-odd students each year in those halls – in English, photography, tailoring – building lives their parents could not have imagined. The architecture is doing exactly what it was designed to do: disappearing so that life could happen inside it. ‘For the people who come after me,' Pruscha had said. They were already here.

cpruscha.com

This article appears in Wallpaper’s July 2026 Design Directory, available from 4 June, in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today