National 9 (Spotlight Weekly)

The Gardener

After taking on Bhaktapur’s city center and Patan’s royal palace, Nepal’s premier conservationist architect is turning over a new leaf.

By Joe Bavier

Garden of dreams : Fitting restoration

Don't worry if you've never heard of Götz Hagmüller. In fact, he'd probably prefer it that way.

A man inclined to remain in the background, when pressed on the matter, the normally eloquent Hagmüller condenses his life and career to a sentence fragment.

"Austrian, architect, film maker, in Nepal for twenty-five years, involved in numerous projects and activities in the field of heritage conservation," he says matter-of-factly, as he lights up a cigarette at the office of his latest undertaking at the Keshar Mahal, just opposite the Royal Palace.

It takes some reading between the lines to pull the full truth out of this simplification. Included among those 'numerous projects and activities' are some gargantuan achievements. As head of a massive urban development project in Bhaktapur, Hagmüller was responsible for revamping what was then a crumbling old city center. More recently, he restored one part of Patan’s old royal palace, a project that resulted in the creation a world-class museum and took a total of fifteen years to complete.

Hagmüller's latest endeavor, like the man himself, involves a certain mixture of East and West. The Keshar Mahal's Garden of Dreams is the enduring legacy of one Nepali aristocrat’s love affair with European culture, and so it seems fitting that its restoration should be undertaken by a European in love with Nepal.

"Nepal has developed this insular but strong self-identity in its architectural and artistic expressions. It has this very identity in clear distinction to the other cultures nearby to which it is otherwise so strongly linked. That makes the architecture of the Newars or of the Malla period really astounding," he says, explaining what originally drew him to the country. Adding with a smile, "And of course, as the romantic Westerner I seem to be, there was the romantic reality of a country in an age which we had passed centuries ago in Europe. To see cities like Bhaktapur was like being in the center of Nürnberg or Siena three hundred years ago."

The Garden of Dreams is a step away from what Hagmüller is used to. For a man obsessed with authenticity, with the scant historical information available, this restoration project presented the architect with an unusually blank canvas. But then again, nothing about the garden has ever been simple.

Kaiser Shumsher's great dream almost never existed at all. It took the intervention of fate in the form of a lucky day gambling with his father, Maharaja Chandra Shumsher, to help him realize the English-style Edwardian garden he'd long visited only in his imagination.

And eighty years later it took another such intervention to save the then abandoned grounds from destruction. At the time, in 1998, having just wrapped up the Patan Museum, Hagmüller was already submitting preliminary proposals for the restoration project, when he learned, in rude fashion, that the extraordinary pavilion on the Thamel side of the garden was being demolished.

"They had already taken half of the roof off and were tearing the walls down," he says, pointing over to the Barkha Pavilion, one of the three of Shumsher's original six seasonal pavilions left after part of the property was sold off for development. "And then it happened that Karna Sakya saw what was going on. We met accidentally there. He went right into the Secretary's office and requested to stop this. And they stopped immediately.

Two days later, that building would have been gone, with no documentation of it to speak of. But they even repaired what they had destroyed."

Six years later, the garden that nearly disappeared forever is well on its way to regaining its former glory. And strolling down its stone pathways, Hagmüller's pride in how his team has been able to transform a few hectares in the heart of Kathmandu is evident.

"In twenty-five years of working on these projects, we've assembled and trained the best craftsmen of Nepal for that purpose." he says. "We probably wouldn't be able to build a high-rise hotel or whatever, but for the restoration of a historical site, they are the best."

And for a man who's spent a career working in brick and hard stone, creating something soft that will live and grow has been a very personal learning experience.

"One big difference between architecture and the art of gardening is that architects dream of creating something which will stand forever. By contrast, any good gardener would see his task as an attempt, an experiment to work with the change of nature over the seasons and years, with the maturing of plants and their decay, and get an understanding from these cycles, of where we come from."