Born in 1954 in Tel Aviv, Israel, Ada Gansach studied at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She first traveled to India, assisting Snehal Shah, a local architect in Gujurat, in his study of water architecture. She joined George Michelle in his architectural research in Vijayanagar before arriving in Nepal.

In 1984, she trekked from Gorkha to Manang and visited the area around Ganesh Himal with Niels Gutschow in 1985. She continued her scouting for the research area, and in 1986 she traveled for three weeks in the Tamur-Arun Koshi in Eastern Nepal. The same year, she joined Niels Gutschow in compiling his inventory of Kathmandu Valley’s Buddhist votive architecture. She contributed several scale drawings of Licchavicaityas from Tebaha and Swayambhu Hill to the project. In 1988, she stayed in Mugu for three months, for which she was sponsored by the Central Research Fund of London University. Her visit to Solukhumbu in 1992 helped her contextualize her research. She omitted Solukhumbu from her study and conducted her fieldwork in the west.

She went to Lower Mustang in 1993 and visited the Dang valley in 1994 for two weeks with an invitation from K. Meyer, an architect, carrying out research there. Between 1993 and 1994, she travelled to Tibet to study their architecture and familiarize herself with the language of Lhasa. During 1993 and 1994, she also continued her expeditions to Humla and Dolpo. Eventually, she decided to concentrate on villages in Humla (1993, 1994), Dolpo (1993, 1994) and Manang (1984, 1985, 1992, 1994).

“I became aware of the limitations of the conventional architectural discourse through my travels and my participation in research in Indian subcontinent.”

Gansach shares in her dissertation that she did not find a framework at the London School of Economics and Art and Architecture at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies. It needed to sufficiently bridge the distance between the objects, the subjects and the theorists during her subsequent studies in anthropology. Her research work with Niels, too, was more focused on studying historical objects following the western academic tradition of fieldwork. It contrasted her earlier experiences in Ahemdabad or Bhaktapur, where “the objects and their interpretation were inseparable from those who produce them, and from their social-economic contexts.”

She conducted her research beginning with documenting the built environment in a series of measured drawings. Eventually, she learned to communicate in Nepali, which helped her establish unmediated communication with the locals. She mentions that “[they] were happy to interpret their buildings, talk about themselves and tell stories about their places.” She completed her doctoral dissertation at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 2000: “Social Construction: A Comparative Study of Architectures in the High Himalaya and North West Nepal.” 

Since the 1980s, she has also been practising as a freelance architect in various cooperative projects in London and Tel Aviv.

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