Located in the dense neighborhood of Kathmandu, the Taragaon Next Complex is a 35000 sq. ft. campus designed by Austrian Architect Carl Pruscha and commissioned by Angur Baba Joshi, a Nepalese scholar in 1968. The campus was initially a hostel for artists and scientists in the Nepal Women's Association. Carl Prusha conceptualized this modern building as a series of individual modular vaulted rooms sitting on cascading plinths. Like Kahn’s IIM Ahmedabad designed in 1961, this building was designed as a complex rather than a singular monolithic structure. Its vaulted ceilings alluded to the Boudhanath stupa symbolically. 

 

The land on which the hostel was built belongs to the Taragaon Regency Hotels, which owns the museum now. The hostel closed in the 1990s, and the structure was neglected for many years before its restoration in 2009, an initiative taken by the Saraf Foundation. The restoration team included prominent figures like Neils Gutschow and Thomas Schrom, who had previously restored major structures in Nepal. The museum was envisioned as "a documentation center to archive the unique trans-local history of this space." The museum and exhibition center opened in 2014, with additions and alterations to the campus. The Nepal Architecture Archive (NAA) founded in 2016 within the campus houses years of collected, documented, and donated research and archival material related to the history and changing architecture of Nepal. 

 

LIke other buildings of this time, Prusha adhered to the principles of critical regionalism. He used the local terrain to create a stepped landscape that unified the modules that were fragmented across the site. The circular openings at the ends of the barrel vaults connect the indoors to the outdoors, whereas the courtyards and open terraces serve as transitional spaces, bringing in natural light and ventilation. Pruscha, an admirer of the Himalayan Vernacular architecture, was  intrigued by the dark red bricks used in buildings across the Kathmandu Valley. The exposed bricks, combined with large circular windows and skylights, were an interpretative gesture that alluded to the traditional architecture of the region. 

 

The campus today is a museum, an exhibition center, art gallery, archiving practice, experimental lab, and amphitheater that acts as an important public space in Kathmandu.