Green Circle: An Ethiopian Eco-Chapel Planned to Grow a Forest Around Its Walls in Phases

Most chapels are judged by what happens inside them. Green Circle asks to be judged by what happens around it. The proposal places a chapel at the centre of a circular masterplan and then gives the surrounding ground a job: to become forest again. Worship anchors the composition, but the real ambition sits in the rings of buildings and planting that radiate outward, turning a single sacred room into the seed of an ecological recovery.

Designed by Claudia Dittwald of Zachodniopomorski Uniwersytet Technologiczny, the project was a Shortlisted Entry in the Eco-Chapel competition on uni.xyz. Set in the Ethiopian landscape, it targets two linked problems the designer identifies directly: the loss of forested land and the need for stronger environmental awareness among local communities. The response is architectural and programmatic at once, a chapel that doubles as an environmental campus.

A Chapel at the Centre, With Community Programme in Orbit

The opening drawings establish the project's governing gesture: a central chapel ringed by a series of semi-circular buildings that hold educational, cultural and community functions. The circle is doing more than symbolising unity and continuity. It sets up a clear hierarchy, with the sacred space as the fixed point and everything else arranged in relation to it, so that visitors moving between classrooms or gathering spaces are always oriented back toward the chapel.

That arrangement matters because it avoids the usual split between a religious building and the facilities bolted onto its edge. Here the supporting programme forms the chapel's enclosure. The result reads less like a church with outbuildings and more like a small settlement organised around a shared centre, which is precisely the kind of place where community engagement can become routine rather than occasional.

Agrostone Panels and Deep Roofs Against the Ethiopian Sun

Dittwald builds the complex from agrostone panels, a construction material commonly associated with Ethiopia. The choice is pragmatic as much as symbolic: a locally relevant material shortens supply chains, cuts transport impacts and keeps the project aligned with regional building practice rather than importing an alien system to a site that is meant to be restored.

The climate strategy is equally grounded. Large roof overhangs shield walls from intense sunlight and, just as usefully, carve out shaded outdoor circulation between buildings. Operable openings and carefully positioned windows draw air through the interiors, reducing reliance on mechanical cooling. None of this is novel technology, and that is the point; the sustainability case rests on shade, airflow and material sense, tools a local community can maintain.

An Environmental Centre Built Into the Liturgy of the Site

The proposal expands the chapel's mission through an environmental centre dedicated to teaching local communities about native ecosystems, biodiversity and sustainable land management. This shifts the complex from a weekly destination to a year-round one, where the buildings act as a framework for learning rather than simply housing it.

What makes the move persuasive is its proximity to the landscape it describes. Lessons about reforestation are delivered steps away from the ground being reforested, so the surrounding site becomes both subject and classroom. The architecture encourages direct engagement over abstract instruction, which is the more likely route to lasting stewardship.

Curving Paths Laid Out for a Forest That Has Yet to Arrive

The aerial rendering captures the whole idea in one frame: a cylindrical hall ringed by fan-shaped pavilions under tan roofs, linked by curving paths that thread through scattered trees. Those trees are the beginning, not the end. The site plan aligns its routes with planned stages of vegetation growth, so the path network is effectively a scaffold for a landscape that will thicken over time.

The designer sets out that growth in phases. Phase One focuses on additional planting to lay the foundation for future ecological growth. Phase Two introduces nursery spaces for cultivating native species, giving the project its own supply of vegetation for ongoing reforestation. Treating time as a design material is the proposal's most original move; the masterplan is drawn for a site that does not yet exist and will be completed by the community that tends it.

Why This Project Matters

Competitions about eco-chapels can easily drift toward green finishes on a conventional building. Green Circle resists that by locating its environmental argument in the plan itself. The circle organises people around a shared centre, the materials and roofs respond to local sun and heat, and the landscape is programmed to regenerate in deliberate stages. Each layer supports the same aim: repairing forested land while building the awareness needed to keep it.

The project also offers a useful model of what a sacred building can be in a place facing ecological loss. Instead of standing apart from the landscape, the chapel becomes the reason to care for it, a fixed point around which planting, teaching and community life accumulate. For a shortlisted student entry, that is a mature proposition: architecture measured not by its finished form on opening day, but by the forest that grows up around it in the years after.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Claudia Dittwald

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Project credits: Eco Chapel in Ethiopia – Green Circle by Claudia Dittwald Eco-Chapel (uni.xyz).