“Architecture should not dominate—it should listen.”
—Fasil Giorghis
Beauty, like truth or virtue, may belong to the domain of philosophy—but it migrates, insistently and unbidden, into art, poetry, music, and architecture. Plato, no stranger to this migration, spoke of the beauty of laws, constitutions, and institutions—order made humane, structure made just. Such is the pulse of my own doctoral work: seeking the convergence of beauty and justice in constitutional design.
But on this occasion, my attention turns to a different kind of architect—one who shapes not legal edifices but the lived environments of our cities. I recently attended a presentation by Fasil Giorghis, Ethiopia’s foremost architect, at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art. In his work, I saw a resplendent confluence of form and memory, stone and spirit. There was a profound lyricism in his use of light and material—a sense that architecture, like law, is ultimately about how we choose to inhabit the world together: what we preserve, what we enshrine, and what we dare to reimagine.
In a field too often dazzled by spectacle, Giorghis has long preferred the quiet gesture. Whether restoring medieval churches, transforming imperial residences, or designing eco-toilets with local masons, his work is marked not by grandeur but by care. In a public conversation held on June 7, 2025 with Heran Sereke-Brhan, Deputy Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, Giorghis offered a moving retrospective of a career rooted in memory, material knowledge, and moral purpose.
The Child Who Ran Through Ruins
Born in Gondar, a city inscribed with the shadows of Ethiopia’s imperial past, Giorghis spent his early years weaving through historic courtyards, unknowingly absorbing the language of stone. After moving to Addis Ababa and completing his education at Teferi Mekonnen School, he joined the School of Architecture at Addis Ababa University. But instead of finding Ethiopia in the curriculum, he found only Europe. His dream was to be the Frank Lloyd Wright of Ethiopia.
The syllabus was rich in the history of western architecture but poor in Lalibela and Gondar. Aksum’s geometric genius was nowhere to be found.
So he taught himself. With pen and brush in hand, he roamed the capital sketching neglected balconies, carved doorways, and worn colonnades—rendering them visible to a society already forgetting them. In doing so, Giorghis was engaged in a kind of inspired recollection—not unlike what Plato describes in the Phaedrus, where the soul, once having glimpsed the Forms, is stirred by beauty to remember. The balconies and lintels of Addis were not merely visual forms; they were architectural memories—signs of a past worth remembering, worth reanimating.
Heritage as a Living Practice
If Giorghis is now recognized as one of the most eminent architects of Ethiopia, it is not for inventing a new style, but for reviving an old ethos. His signature is not formal—it is ethical. Restoration, for him, is never about static preservation but about reuse with respect. He insists on adaptive transformations—reviving buildings not as fossils but as spaces for contemporary civic life.
This ethos stands in quiet dialogue with an earlier era of Ethiopian architectural ambition. In the 1960s, Addis Ababa underwent a dramatic construction boom, catalyzed by its rising international stature as host city to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and the newly founded Organization of African Unity. Under Emperor Haile Selassie, architecture became a diplomatic and symbolic instrument—an effort to materialize an African modernity that could stand alongside global peers yet remain anchored in Ethiopian tradition.
Working with expatriate architects like Arturo Mezzedimi, Henri Chomette, and the team of Zalman Enav and Michael Tedros, the imperial state sought to craft a built environment that fused international modernist vocabularies with local idioms. Italian colonial planning logics were reappropriated, not simply erased. The result was a distinctive imperial modernism—at once forward-looking and historically situated.
In this lineage, Giorghis’s work marks both a continuity and a corrective. Where Haile Selassie’s architects sculpted modernity through grand public works, Giorghis has channeled it through civic humility. The Red Terror Martyrs’ Memorial Museum, for example, was never conceived as a monumental gesture. Giorghis declined to build a triumphalist edifice and instead designed a quiet museum embedded into the slope of Meskel Square. Drawing on indigenous forms—zigzagging masonry, rock-hewn transitions—the structure dignifies national memory without aestheticizing suffering.
Plato warned in the Republic that imitative art, when fixated on appearances, could mislead the soul—away from truth, away from the Forms. But Giorghis’s architecture does not imitate. It participates. It does not seduce the viewer with illusion; it invites the citizen into relation—with time, with place, with others.
The Team Behind the Vision
Giorghis is bold enough to deny the myth of the solitary genius. “This is not a one-man show,” he insists. “I work with brilliant, committed young Ethiopian architects.” Whether restoring Baata le Maryam Mausoleum, Takla Haimanot Church, the Taitu Cultural Center or the Trinity Cathedral in Addis Ababa, each project is a collaborative undertaking.
These restorations are supported by a remarkable array of benefactors—from government ministries to diaspora Ethiopians and working-class donors contributing a few coins. The architecture becomes communal.
“From very poor women to wealthy businessmen,” he observes, “people give what they can. That’s when you know it matters.”
This emphasis on shared endeavor recalls Plato’s own ambivalence about inspiration. In the Ion, poetic madness is both dangerous and divine: the poet is a passive vessel, overcome by a god, moved like an iron ring suspended from a Muse’s magnet. But the real miracle, as Plato seems to recognize in the Phaedrus, is that this madness—if properly oriented—can lead the soul not to chaos but to truth. Giorghis’s architecture channels such divine energy not into spectacle but into civic continuity. His buildings do not claim credit. They listen.
Gondar: A City Reawakened
One of his most ambitious ongoing projects is the restoration of Gondar’s royal compound, including the 17th-century palace of Emperor Fasilides. The site, eroded by time and water, is being rehabilitated with original materials—lime, rock, and timber. But the effort goes far beyond stonework.
Giorghis and his team envision a socially integrated restoration: transforming the main palace into a museum, and surrounding buildings into workshops for local craftspeople—woodworkers, leather artisans, guides.
This model of preservation-as-livelihood is, in many ways, a microcosm of his architectural philosophy: buildings must serve both memory and economy.
Adwa: Stones of Memory and Paths of Renewal
Giorghis sees in the Adwa Heritage Preservation Project a rare and vital convergence: “a good example of public-private partnership which involved the local community as well.” It is, in many ways, a model for how heritage work in Ethiopia—and indeed across Africa—might be reimagined.
Here, too, his contribution is best described as inspired—not in the extravagant sense Plato warns against, but in the deeper sense of being attuned to the spirit of place. Inspiration, in Plato’s later works, is not mere mania. It is the soul’s recognition of beauty, of form, of order, calling it home.
Initiated by Elizabeth Ambaye, a native daughter of Adwa, and her husband Rick Stoner, the project began as a family remembrance and matured into a civic renewal. The Adwa Heritage Center now stands completed. Adjacent to it, the Assem Park project restores the natural and urban landscape. Most urgent of all is the Campaign to Save Old Adwa.
Here, Giorghis’s role is pedagogical. As professor and mentor, he has guided students in the documentation of one of Adwa’s oldest neighborhoods, a project that serves as both record and protest—against forgetting, against the kind of modernity that levels difference and silences time.
A Story from Lalibela
Heran Sereke-Brhan shared a telling anecdote during their public dialogue. One day in Lalibela, two young men pulled Fasil aside. They had once been guides. Their dream was to build a hotel. An American couple quietly financed the construction. That hotel—Mountain View—stands today not as monument to wealth, but to aspiration.
The original design was done by a student of Giorghis. The second phase was guided by Giorghis himself. These echoes of mentorship are part of his larger method: to build through others. His influence is less visible in form than in spirit.
Learning from the Vernacular
Giorghis has long championed vernacular architecture—not as aesthetic, but as epistemology. In Aksum, he helped design a library using ancient construction techniques. In Mekelle, he designed ecological toilets from local stone and earth.
“When I go to a site,” he says, “the only outsider is me. Everything else is local.”
In this too, one hears a Platonic resonance. In the Meno, Socrates praises inspired ignorance—not as an end, but as a beginning. Giorghis does not impose knowledge. He uncovers it, listens to it, dignifies it. His students learn not by projecting ideas, but by recovering the meaning that already inheres in a place.
The Architecture of Patience
His pedagogical ethos is best captured in a trip to Aksum in 1998. He brought 29 architecture students, who at first scoffed at the mud and rock houses. “What are we going to learn from this?” they asked. He said nothing. By the end of the week, they were transformed.
“There is so much knowledge here,” they whispered. The humility had set in.
This is the architecture Fasil Giorghis teaches—and practices. One that attends to local material, to forgotten skill, to community voice. It is not the architecture of abstraction or ego. It is the architecture of relation—of reverence for place, and responsibility to people.
“Ethiopia has so much to offer—to the world, and to itself,” he says. “But to see it, you must be patient. You must find the middle point.”
In a world of rapidly vanishing places, Giorghis reminds us: to build is not just to create. It is to remember. To repair. To make space—for beauty, for justice, and for the slow dignity of time.
Alemayehu Fentaw Weldemariam is Managing Editor of Africa Today, published quarterly by Indiana University Press, and Orbis Africa, published by the Roy Sieber Chair in African Art History at Indiana University Bloomington and Diasporic Africa Press. He is a PhD Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Democracy, majoring in constitutional design and minoring in political philosophy.
