Piassa Indigenous Modernism

Inspecting through the maps of Addis Ababa from the 1880s up to today’s Google satellite images, it is impossible to avoid noticing how the city has handled its expansion and morphological transformation within a century. And in what way it dealt confrontations between modern planning and traditional settlements. Bahru Zewde (Professor) describes global character of modernization as ‘increasingly urban orientation of a society’ is a very concept that explains the Ethiopian urbanization as literally digested since the emergence of Addis. However, the modern’s attributes’ close association with the western experience such as its industrial novelties, Bahru argues, had produced a deformed understanding of modernization that is considered to be tantamount to westernization. Eventually in the 21st century, the non-colonized African city chose to lean completely on western references as symbols of positive development in its contemporary architecture and by so promoting false images of modernism on its buildings, ittakes part in the global market as an import dependent industry.

Limitations in thinking to utilize design and lack of urban oriented planning principles are some of the major reasons the scholars underline to the indifferences that become visible in the built environment of today; neglected identities, landscapes and contexts. Design is defenseless to the interests of developers and is misunderstood to end after building permits are secured. The realization of the building is largely left to the developer. According to the prognoses of Dirk E. Hebel (professor) in his 2012 publication, 80Pct of the building materials are imported, and therefore, investment capital, domestic knowledge, entrepreneurship and healthy growth of local markets are out-casted from the value chain process of the country.

Academic publications also highlighted on the quantity of energy these glazed tower buildings, by ignoring to design appropriately for the climate, unnecessarily consumed to cooling techniques of the increasingly heated indoor environments and reckoned their share on the recurring electrical energy interruption of the city.“Chaotic urbanism without internal coherence” is a dominant ruler of the contemporary Addis skyline.

Yet, some parts of the city such as Piassa and around the National Theater are built in accordance with urban oriented planning principles. While National Theatre area, also known as the Commercial District by professionals, has an educated reinvention of urbanization concepts in its own context Piassa is that we are able to extract characters of healthy spatial development that suites existing conditions of the city. They represent spatial (in its architectural and urban sense) legacies of the late 19th and 20th century Ethiopian urbanization processes in relatively abundant concentration, while they synchronized and improved the indigenous social structure intact and in harmony with modernism. To the indigenous Ethiopian lifestyle, the nucleus of modernization had been completely foreign while the way it has been introduced and contextualized remained profoundly familiar. Urban spaces such as Piassa had been instrumental to the comfortable access of fresh standards of modernism to the domestic environment. This gradually abstracted itself to become ‘the spirit of the place’, or technically speaking the ‘Genius Loci’; Piassa as the modernist center of the city where those western technological innovations and scientific understandings had come to light and tested, until the beginning of the second half of the 20th century.

Based on their spatial characters, Aden Street and Ghandi Street fall in to a similar category where they reflect on the pre-five-years-war face of the city while Haile Selassie, Cunningham and Dejasmach Jote streets put an emphasis on the achievements of the second and third generation modernizations. Collectively, these streets of Piassa are unique to Addis for providing pedestrian friendly spaces and inviting people to enjoy outdoor experiences with a rare urban-spatial continuity. The proportionality and scale of the buildings to the width of the streets are made not to be dominant over pedestrians. The physical status of most parts of the area is severely underprivileged as of current, where it’s important to admit the indigenous has a hard-lined cynical attitude about compromising one’s superstitious and archaic habits to be reciprocated with profound progress in civilization and is observed more successful at hindering modern these legacies than developing it. Workneh Eshete, the first Ethiopian educated as a medical doctor, once aphorized in his diary ‘the country is beautiful but the man is vile’; nevertheless we concentrate on registering the precedent ideas and spatial qualities of early architectural achievements to modernize it as a unique African experience.

Piassa’s streets are highly significant for its historic skyline with a dominance of early 20th century leading style in architecture. The “Addis Ababa style” emerged as a necessity to a transformed urban lifestyle by the time.It is a sophistication of the simple cylindrical hut by verbalization of the central wide space with smaller spaces circling it and no corridors introduced. It is characterized by such combination of spaces, and in some cases houses, and an introduction of reception hall (i.e. a central space). And is built from heavy masonry in the ground floor topped with a wooden balcony and posts with a froth of glazing – richly decorated mostly after the Armenian, Greek and Indian influences with a fanciful gable roof shapes. The balconies and verandah recesses, being closely associated in space flow with roads, witnessed some crucial events in the history of the city as it rode waves of popular rejoice in the streets.

On the other hand, the buildings in Piassa are good examples of how architecture modernizes while embracing indigenous social cohesion as the Genius Loci of the place in an urban scale. The buildings that emerged in the 60s maintained to persist on these spatial qualities of the place with their balconies, buffering corridors and better urban dialogue with each other. The area including the Baghasserian building, which houses the famous Tea Room, particularly articulated the familiar character of the place, inviting pedestrians to profoundly experience the urban-spatial continuum.

An acutely triangular island created by a highway from De Gaulle square to Gebrewold building – down to Mohammed-Ally store (today the old post office) and back, is also properly experimented and revived with an alternate but interesting interpretation of the same underlying concept. As the East – West route of the highway is separated by a sloppy landscape featuring down to the West – East route, the architects of the time carved spaces from a land fill (a design technique particular to Ethiopia’s ancient and medieval period) and programmed the inner-city overlapping activities in the island known for Centro pastry including provision of a rare urban hygiene facility program to the city. The roof of these spaces which comes at level with the East – West route are actually, obvious to the trained eye, programmed after a necessity of lobby space for the cinema across the street. Today it rather attracts micro-economies.

At the center of Piassa, Arada building built in 1984 energetically illustrates the concept of Genius Loci in an even more sophisticated, latest fashion in larger scale. Being the most recent and probably the last achievement of such school of thought in the architecture of Addis Ababa, the streets are multiplied within the building’s cascading volumetric structure with an intricate spatial flow through individual and common spaces taking the central role and towering the place’s landmark. The alignment of the cells within the horizontal volume is a good example of designing for the climate.

7th Year • Dec.16 – Jan.15 2019 • No. 69