Carl Pruscha, an Austrian architect who mainly dedicated his professional career to investigating and working closely in the field of regional architecture in the Eastern world, a territory that was being overlooked at a time when the modern movement in architecture and in the rest of the world was booming. Through an overview of his life, we will highlight some of his most relevant works in Nepal and Sri Lanka and understand how Pruscha managed to stamp his unique visions of architecture and cities into his built projects.
He was born in Innsbruck, Austria in 1936. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with a Master's degree in architecture, he later continued his studies in the United States, where he had his first practical experience working on projects in New York City. He began to stir his career towards urban planning while he was studying at Harvard, connecting with major exponent architects of the modernist movement, such as Josep Lluis Sert and Lewis Mumford. "He had no interest in architecture detached from its cultural, social, and discursive context", and this was reflected in his final thesis project entitled Vision for Global Urbanization. After graduating from Harvard, Prusha started working in several practices in New York City, claiming his utopian vision of cities and architecture, which many times led him to professional frustrations.
