To build is to remember: The architectural practice of Fasil Giorghis | Capital Newspaper

To build is to remember: The architectural practice of Fasil Giorghis | Capital Newspaper capitalethiopia.com/2025/07/06/to-build-is-to-remember-the-architectural-practice-of-fasil-giorghis/
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.
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