Protection Chapel: A River-Born Greenway That Leads the City Toward an Octagonal Sanctuary in Ethiopia

Most chapels begin at the door. Protection Chapel begins at the riverbank. The project argues that a place of worship in a fast-growing Ethiopian city cannot simply be dropped onto a cleared plot; it has to be reached, and the route itself has to repair what urban expansion erased. The building is the destination, but the real design is the landscape network that leads to it.

Designed by Rebecca Vassallo, the proposal links the River Bulbula, the surrounding urban fabric, and a contemporary chapel through a single landscape strategy. Historical analysis of the site revealed traces of lost watercourses, wooded areas, and ecological corridors. Vassallo treats those traces as a brief: the chapel becomes a civic and ecological landmark, anchoring green corridors, pedestrian paths, gardens, and community spaces that stitch fragmented neighbourhoods back to their natural ground.

A Footpath That Behaves Like a Tributary

The site plan, laid over an aerial photograph, makes the core move legible at a glance: the octagonal chapel sits inside a park that opens toward the river rather than turning its back on it. Vassallo calls this network a green synapsy, a connective tissue that restores continuity between the ecosystems around the River Bulbula and the urbanised parts of the city. The pedestrian routes are conceived as extensions of the river itself, so the walk to the chapel reads as water finding its way back into the city.

The massing view below the plan confirms that the building is deliberately modest against its landscape. That restraint matters. By making the journey through shaded walkways and gardens the main event, the project stages a gradual shift from street noise to calm, so that visitors arrive already slowed down. The chapel earns its role as a destination because the approach does the spiritual preparation.

An Octagon Sized for the Neighbourhood, Not the Skyline

The ground floor plan and main section show a centralised octagonal room lit through pointed openings, a form that gathers people around a shared centre rather than lining them up toward a distant altar. The two urban profile sections, drawn at different scales, are the more revealing drawings: they place the chapel within the city's grain and show how the building and its grounds mediate between dense development and the river corridor.

This dual reading supports the programme Vassallo describes. The chapel is meant to hold religious and community functions together, so that spiritual wellbeing, physical health, environmental education, and social interaction share one environment. An open theatre forms part of this civic landscape, referencing historic Ethiopian sacred spaces where public gathering and cultural expression took place alongside worship. The chapel works as a community anchor, not a standalone monument.

Courtyards in Place of Compound Walls

The east and west elevations place the chapel among trees and low white volumes on sloping ground, with a teal sun hovering above. What the drawings emphasise is permeability. Instead of the enclosed compound typical of many religious sites, the proposal uses a series of interconnected courtyards and gardens that improve environmental performance while keeping the grounds publicly accessible.

The planting strategy gives that openness substance. More than half of the site is given over to wooded areas and gardens, using native and climate-appropriate species including eucalyptus, jacaranda, dracaena, euphorbia, quora, and pond pine. These gardens also serve as teaching landscapes where visitors encounter local flora and the idea of environmental stewardship. The ecology is not decoration around the chapel; it is the larger share of the project.

Walking the Approach Before Building It

The line perspectives from the west and north sit beside a photograph of a path and a sketch of a courtyard, a pairing that shows how Vassallo tested the experience of arrival as much as the object. The perspectives frame the chapel at the end of a route, partly screened, revealed gradually as the path turns. The courtyard sketch suggests the scale of the intermediate spaces where people pause before entering.

This is also where the project's link to Ethiopian sacred architecture becomes clearest. The designer draws on the country's significant religious monuments and reinterprets their principles through a contemporary lens, and the sense of a sanctuary approached through landscape, rather than presented on a plaza, carries that lineage without resorting to pastiche.

Pointed Arches Half Hidden in a Green Hillside

The rendered east and south views show the pointed-arch octagon sitting behind trees and white blocks on a green hillside. The vegetation sits in front of the architecture, not behind it as a backdrop, which reinforces the hierarchy established in plan: landscape first, building second. The pointed arches give the chapel a recognisable sacred profile, while its partial concealment keeps it from dominating the ground it is meant to restore.

The renders also suggest how the project might feel at maturity, once the planted canopy fills in. If the greenway works as intended, the chapel becomes something glimpsed and approached over time, a quiet marker in a restored landscape rather than a landmark that shouts across the city.

Why This Project Matters

Protection Chapel reframes what a religious building can be responsible for. Vassallo starts from the loss of historic waterways, native vegetation, and ecological continuity, and positions the chapel as the reason to rebuild those systems. Worship, gathering, education, and ecological repair are made to depend on one another, so the building cannot be read apart from its corridor to the River Bulbula.

For cities expanding as quickly as Ethiopia's, that is a useful provocation. Sacred sites tend to be among the most stable and valued places in a community, and this proposal suggests they could also be the most effective places to restore lost landscape. The octagon is the image people will remember, but the lasting idea is the path: a route that lets the river lead the city back to its own ground.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Rebecca Vassallo

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Project credits: Protection Chapel by Rebecca Vassallo.