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Today we have brought you one interesting project from our capital, Addis Ababa.........It was once the pinnacle of luxury for the city's inhabitants...."Fil Wuha"

Architects: Michael Tedros & Zalman + Ruth Enav
Completion: 1965
At the end of the 19th century the attraction of the thermal springs of Filwoha, literally meaning hot water, contributed to transforming the temporary royal camp into a permanent settlement, which then became the city of Addis Ababa.

In the 1960s, when Addis Ababa modeled itself as the capital of Africa, the diplomatic quarter was enriched by a new building to make the benefits of the hot springs more accessible to the international diplomats and tourists as well as the public. The new Filwoha thermal baths were built to accommodate different spas in four categories from basic to luxurious, a therapeutic department, and a hotel.

Despite its prominent location on the slopes of the palace hill, the Filwoha baths appear modest. The cluster of mainly single-story buildings is tucked away under large trees, and does not show any representative facade. Typically for the structuralist approach to architecture of that time, everything is based on one geometric pattern - a hexagonal grid that defies all elements, e.g. the arrangement between the buildings, the outline of the roofs, the shapes of the individual rooms, as well as the openings of the skylights.

Also, the constructive elements are restricted to a limited set: a simple concrete plinth, brick walls of standard size, triangular columns, and relatively small-span hexagonal pre-fabricated concrete domes. This mix of archaic labor-intensive techniques and modern technologies that are appropriate to the time and place of construction derives from the two architects ‘background in building educational facilities throughout the country (Tedros) and studying Tropical architecture at the Architectural Association in London (Enav). The Filwoha baths were built in less than a year. One of the architects even claims that the baths were „the largest in the world at that time “.