Born and raised during-and-post the second world war, Wolfgang Korn had a rather difficult childhood. After completing his O-Levels in a grammar school, he started his three years of apprenticeship as an architectural draftsman in Düsseldorf, which involved practical experience as a carpenter and mason. He studied architecture at the Art College (Werkkunstschule) in Krefeld from 1963 to 1967. The main field of his study was general design and town planning. While working on his exam paper, he grew fascinated with the technique of documenting historical architecture by drawings to scale. As a result, he produced drawings during his travels to France, Greece, and Tunisia. After completing his vocational education, he applied to German Volunteer Service (DED – Deutscher Entwicklungsdienst) for a project in West Africa. However, the circumstances led him to Nepal instead.

He arrived in Nepal in 1968 and worked in the Department of Housing and Physical Planning for the government of Nepal. He is primarily known for his contributions to Kathmandu Valley’s architectural records and efforts to preserve cultural heritages, especially Newari architecture, during the following eight years.

“After my arrival on the 5th January 1968, mouth open as if stoned, my eyes drinking it all in: the palace, the temples, the old houses along narrow lanes, the dirt, the smell, the noise of the crowd, the carvings in wood and stone, the abundant presence of gods and goddesses!”

Unprepared for that reality, he felt he had been cast headfirst into a medieval town’s complexity. Information about Nepal at that time was confined to reports by mountaineers. The information about Nepal and the Newars could have been more extensive, even though they had shaped the rich urban environment of the Kathmandu Valley.

For the first three months of 1968, he worked for the “Physical Planning Section” of the Department of Housing and Physical Planning of His Majesty’s Government of Nepal under Krishna Raj Pande and chief engineer B.L. Shrestha, also in collaboration with the first Nepalese woman engineer, Shanti Shrestha. He prepared basic designs of planned residences for a ministerial quarter near Pulchowk and also of an office complex for the Electricity Department, built – at least partly. Subsequently, he worked as a group leader in the Town Planning Section, surveying temple sites outside the settlements and also the Durbar Squares of three royal cities and other essential monument zones.

Then onward, he worked as a group leader in the Town Planning Section for surveying all temple sites outside most of the settlements, the Durbar Squares of the three royal cities, and other monument zones. The Austrian architect Carl Pruscha was deputed to their office as a United Nations consultant and, as such, prepared a comprehensive Physical Development Plan, which was published by the end of 1969. Wolfgang’s role was to prepare top-view settlement maps of important villages (based on aerial photographs) such as Kirtipur, Thankot, Khokana, Bungamati, Chapagaon, Sankhu, and Bouddha. One of the tasks included measuring the site maps of some village centres, such as Khokana. They had to work in greater detail using simple, readily available technical instruments like measuring tape and folding rulers. These initial surveys were later extended and incorporated into two volumes by UNESCO in 1975: “Preservation of Physical Environment and Cultural Heritage – Protective Inventory.”

Besides documenting buildings, Korn was also into sports. In the spring of 1968, he took part in athletic competitions (1500 and 5000 m runs) at the Tundikhel, where he met and befriended Kamal Chitrakar, the then table-tennis champion. They even founded the HIMALI TEAM, the best athletic team for over 2.5 years outside the police and army teams. He was also a coach to female Mahendra Bhavan Girls High School athletes who, in his guidance, twice beat the long-time winners from St. Marys – the rich Ranas and Shahs – at the yearly High School competitions. He also was a part of various football teams: Boys Union for one year, Annapurna Team for two years, and for several years, the New Road Team.

In the first half of the year 1969, he dedicated several weeks to the German agricultural project in Khairenitar/Pokhara, designing a master plan, residential and office buildings, warehouses, and storage buildings, and also supervising the initial phase of the construction of residential buildings. In 1970, he had already published an article on the architecture of the Kathmandu Valley in Germany’s most famous architectural magazine (Bauwelt), incorporating, among others, a measured drawing (section) of the Nautale Darbar, the nine-storeyed tower of the Kathmandu Palace.

“To my knowledge the first ever published detailed measurement of a Newar building! To add a funny anecdote: A professor from the Zurich University protested in a letter to the magazine claiming that the documentation must be based on pure fantasy because to his knowledge such a building would never stand unharmed.”

Measuring historic buildings found in the Kathmandu Valley brought him into contact with Dr. Mary Slusser. With a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation, he had prepared several drawings of the Indrasattal in Bhaktapur, the Kasthamandap and Lakshmi-Narayan Sattal of Kathmandu Durbar Square, and also other buildings, between January and June of 1970 – some of which Slusser published in collaboration with Gautama Vajra Vajracharya in Artibus Asiae in 1974. Later – in 1982 – she published other surveys – of the Char Narayan Temple of Patan, Buddhist monasteries (Chusya Bahal, Kathmandu), historical city gates (their locations), and rest houses (patis) in her monumental work “Nepal Mandala.” Leaving aside the drawings by the Danish group of architects in 1968 for the Bungamati Project, these were the first measured and published drawings of Newar architecture that supported a distinct typology. The most extensive measurement was followed by the then most detailed drawings at the scale 1:50 of the Pujahari Math in Bhaktapur. Korn even got involved in emergency roof repairs of the Hindu Priest House- which he did with his own hands with the help of some untrained helpers from the neighbourhood. In total, this project lasted eight months of the year 1971. He often recalls: “I spent these eight months only eating jerry-swari with black tea.” Financed by German Mark (DM), the Pujahari Math was later restored by a group of architects from Darmstadt, Germany, and presented as a wedding gift for the then Crown Prince Birendra and Princess Aishwarya.

From January to April 1972, he prepared – alone – for the “Temple Catalogue Project Nepal,” an inventory of all tiered temples (pagodas) which included a photographic catalogue and the presentation of a typology. Furthermore, he prepared a few detailed surveys of Temples – a project by the “Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft” (German Association for Research”). Unfortunately, the planned catalogue was not published due to financial problems. After spending some time in Germany (November 1972 – June 1973), he returned to Kathmandu by the end of July 1973 to join the Hanuman Dhoka Renovation Project until March 1977, guided by the British architect John Sanday – a project of UNESCO, with substantial financial support from Germany. He was responsible for training craftsmen and counterparts and the survey/measuring the Bhaktapur-, Lalitpur-, Kirtipur- and Kathmandu’s Nautale Tower.

He privately continued documenting temples, monasteries, public rest houses, private houses, details of finely carved windows, construction details, and the like. Finally, his book, “The Traditional Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley,” was published in 1976. This book is a result of his private research from several years of work in the Kathmandu Valley.

“A very rewarding experience which allowed me to publish the first book on Newar architecture which keeps serving as a standard reference till now. It is of interest to note that at that time I had to avoid the title “NEWAR ARCHITECTURE” by order of the royal palace – it had to be termed “traditional” but without saying what the tradition was based on.”

In April 1977, at the request of the World Bank and as part of the “Khumbu Region Tourism Study,” Corneille Jest, John Sanday, and Korn went along the historic route from Jiri to the Everest region on foot, surveying Buddhist monasteries. His job was to measure and document the monasteries they visited.

In 1979 he joined the State Conservation Office in Hesse, Germany. Still, he kept working on his studies of the Newar architecture of Nepal. He eventually published the book, “Licchavi Caityas im Kathmandu-Tal” in 2004. In the following years, he continued working on the theme “Traditional Newar Architecture.” In 2014 and 2015, he published “The Traditional Newar Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley – The Sikharas” and “The Traditional Newar Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley – The Stupas and Chaityas,” respectively. After retiring in 2006, he accompanied his wife (who had a contract with the German Volunteer Service from 2008 to 2010) to the “Golden Triangle” in northern Laos. He published the first study on Northern Laos’s Buddhist monasteries, “The Buddhist Monasteries of Muang Sin.” Even so, Nepal was constantly in his mind.

“Emotionally still deeply connected to Nepal, I and my wife visited the Kathmandu Valley for some days … in 2006 on our visit to Tibet. I experienced a profound shock in the face of the drastic changes to the urban and cultural landscape. But it could not kill the spirit of discovery that had excited me so much back in January 1968 – the reason for my coming to live in Kathmandu for almost a decade and loving every minute of it.”

Korn has visited Nepal once or twice yearly since 2013 for a minimum length of about five weeks. In 2013, he met Sukra Sagar, a historian and archaeologist with similar interests. They went around temples and studied the details that made them extraordinary. They were curious about the erotic struts abundant in the temples around the Valley too. They worked together to co-author the book, “Erotic Carvings of the Kathmandu Valley Found on the Struts of Newar Temples,” launched in 2019.

“With the death of Sukra Sagar Shrestha in the morning of 19th April 2017 I lost a real good friend, and Nepal, one of its leading minds in the fields of art, architecture and cultural heritage.”

In 2015, after the earthquake hit Nepal, he arrived a month later. His drawings/measurements of about 45 years earlier helped reconstruct the monuments of Maju Dega (of which he writes, “only partly finished in poor quality),” Kasthamandap of Kathmandu, Char Narayan of Patan, and the Vatsala Durga Temple of Bhaktapur.

“In autumn of that year – when looking through all my photographs and copies of sketches and drawings – I found the measurements of four most important historical buildings of the fully destroyed Maju Dega (three-tiered pagoda) of Kathmandu Durbar Square, the Vatsala Durga stone- temple of Bhaktapur Durbar Square, the Char-Narayan Dega (two-tiered pagoda) of Patan Darbar Square, and – last but not the least- of the Kasthamandap (the most ancient and largest rest house/Sattal, not only of Kathmandu but the whole of Nepal). That meant that I could not only transfer all measurements into copies of the original drawings on tracing paper but hand them over to the mayors of the three cities as a most valuable basis for the rebuilding of the mentioned historic structures.”

The changing landscape and unorganised planning of Kathmandu Valley are undoubtedly disappointing, but this has not affected Korn’s zeal to try to preserve the Valley’s architecture and heritage.

 Kathmandu, Patan, Bhaktapur, Solukhumbu

Pujarimath, Kasthamandap

1. “The Traditional Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley,” 1976.
2. “The Traditional Newar Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley – The Sikharas,” 2014.
3. “The Traditional Newar Architecture of the Kathmandu Valley – The Stupas and the Chaityas,” 2015.
4. “Erotic Carvings of the Kathmandu Valley Found on Struts of Newar Temples,” 2019.

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