Infill Housing Prototype for Post-Earthquake Kathmandu

In 2015, an earthquake of 7.6 magnitude struck Nepal damaging over one million homes.1 While there has been a significant effort to rebuild the rural housing stock, only 38% of the homes in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal’s most populous urban centre, have been rebuilt.2 The demand for new homes is escalating as the region is one of the world’s most rapidly urbanising territories.3 In the historic central areas of the towns and cities of the Kathmandu Valley, traditional houses are being replaced with concrete-framed structures with brick-infill. Vernacular construction techniques of masonry and brick are deemed too expensive and therefore are becoming obsolete. Land plots are often subdivided, reflecting changes of split ownership between siblings of old family homes that no longer want to live together,4 resulting in narrow, tall houses that are prone to future structural failure during an earthquake, and have low levels of natural light and ventilation. This paper advocates for an alternative housing typology that transitions away from current building practices to one that is more seismically resilient, more sustainable, harnesses opportunities to salvage materials, yet maintains affordability and so can be accessed by the majority of the population.