The paper deals with the exterior design of town houses both inside and outside monument zone of the eastern part of Bhaktapur in Kathmandu Valley registered as a World Cultural Heritage site in 1979. Analysis consists of following steps. Firstly, authors composed the original format of survey sheet on facades for Nepali town houses. Secondly, the paper submits a hypothesis on extension/ reconstruction with regard to �eaves types' de�ned by the paper. Then the paper compared fa�ade designs by eaves types inside monument zone with those outside monument zone. Finally, Eaves types are con�rmed with reconstruction or �oor extension period.

This paper aims to discuss fundamental units forming urban settlement blocks and their development process which demarcate urban fabric with respect to the combination arrangement of urban dwellings types. Bhaktapur is known as one of the historic cities of the World Heritage Site in Kathmandu Valley. The analysis focuses on the house distributions that have common votary areas of the house guardian deity called chetrapatra and the aerial extent of the same surname (thar�. Considering these into account, the authors classi�ed urban dwellings into 9 types. We try to submit a hypothesis on the development process of planning type clusters of urban dwellings as fundamental units forming urban settlement blocks.

The Gorkha earthquake in 2015 was a recent large-scale earthquake that caused severe damage to many historic masonry buildings in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. The authors conducted a visual inspection survey of seismically damaged buildings after the earthquake in the historic town district of Bhaktapur in the Kathmandu Valley. The first part of this paper reports the distribution of the historic masonry buildings for each damage level in the surveyed area. A concentrating zone of severely-damaged buildings was explicitly found in the damage-level distribution map. Almost half of all the surveyed buildings were severely damaged during the earthquake, and most of these were historic masonry townhouse buildings. In the second part, the ambient vibration characteristics of the conventional historic masonry buildings in Bhaktapur are investigated. Typical dwelling houses in a historic town district in Nepal, which generally formed terraced houses built around a courtyard, were targeted for the measurement. Thus, the influence of adjacent buildings, which makes it difficult to identify the predominant natural frequencies from building vibration measurements, was also observed. Microtremor measurements using two accelerometers were conducted at 11 historic masonry buildings to investigate the discrimination degree for identifying the predominant natural frequency of conventional townhouse buildings. The estimated primary natural frequencies of these buildings were compared with the results of the screening model analysis. The advantages of using the proposed screening model analysis to improve the uncertainty of the first natural frequency identification by the microtremor measurement are discussed. Additional measurements of the microtremors at 4 of the 11 measured buildings were conducted using a different location combination of the two acceleration sensors. The sensors were placed between two different floors, and the transfer functions of each floor were investigated to observe the predominant vibration components on the floors in the entire building. Moreover, the coherence values observing the in-plane correlation of the floor responses were also analyzed for the dataset measured at two points separated on the same floor. Finally, an effective method for measuring the microtremors is discussed to improve the assessment of the vibration characteristics of conventional historic masonry buildings in Nepal.

This paper makes a study of street patterns and organization of dwelling units of the historic city of Bhaktapur, a World Heritage Site in Kathmandu Valley. Spatial syntax is used to analyze the street patterns, which shows the western part of the city as structured along its main street while the eastern part more nucleated with squares as centers of the settlement. With this clue that suggests the development phase of Bhaktapur city, the patterns of dwelling clusters of the eastern part are studied. The study taking into account of specific settlement culture of Newars, the traditional inhabitants of the Valley, then makes a typological differentiation of the dwelling clusters that are also related to development phase of the settlement. The paper then studies the location of the shrine of Ganesa—an essential religious feature of the neighborhood. Further, user households of other community facilities, such as pati—the resting place, and hiti—the water fountain, are identified and the respective user community compared with respect to the neighborhood boundaries.

This study discusses the transformation of stupas in the Gandhara Buddhist temples focusing plinth forms and masonry techniques. The fi rst article studies the remains of two archaeological sites, Ranigat and Takht-i-bahi, located in "Central Gandhara" where is the core region of Gandhara in the broad meaning. It was found 1) the plinth forms are categorized into three such as one-story type, two-story type, step-down type, 2) one-story and stepdown types are common in Ranigat site and two-story type in Takht-i-bahi site, and 3) the transitions of masonry techniques of two sites have commonality.