"To assemble is to gather together as a group of people with a common interest. To assemble is to construct a whole from constituent parts. As both congregation and construction, assembly is at the heart of the architectural process."
Assembly is a multi-sensory installation curated by Cotter & Naessens Architects for the Irish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the most pre-eminent architecture showcase in the world.
The project is the result of an interdisciplinary collaborative process between Cotter & Naessens Architects, sound artist David Stalling, architect and poet Michelle Delea, curator Luke Naessens, and woodworker Alan Meredith.
Inspired by the innovative political model of the Citizens' Assembly, the design takes the form of a multi-sensory installation that offers visitors a soundscape to be inhabited and a space to be heard.
Below, the team behind Assembly discuss the evolution of the project...
Luke Naessens: How have you interpreted the word "Assembly" during this project?
Louise Cotter: The dual meaning of the word, meaning congregation and construction, is fundamental to architectural practice. We are addressing the now, and the process of making, but also the future in creating a space that allows people to come together as a group. As the project developed, I have also appreciated the value and meaning of assembling a team and creating space for the work to evolve and grow in ways that were not entirely predicted.
Michelle Delea: Disperse and dismantle are antonyms of the word assembly. It is kinetic, guided by forces of will and of work. I imagine assembly as a common formula we've adopted to activate or to rouse the complexity in our subject matters. There is always a product at the end of assembly, an unpredictable outcome, a learning opportunity. This is what excites and challenges our process as designers.
Watch: Introducing Assembly at the Venice Biennale 2025
David Stalling: As a sound practitioner who works both with sounds as well as the physical transducers/ instruments that transmit them into a space, I primarily thought about assembly in a sculptural sense: gathering sounds, shaping them, ordering and re-ordering them according to certain rules; making a structure to let these assembled sounds be heard, while the nature of the sounds themselves would be conducive to encourage people to assemble.
LN: Louise, how did you initially come to this topic?
LC: For a long time, we have been very interested in places of assembly and are drawn to public spaces with powerful volumes energised by light and sound. Buildings like cathedrals or train stations hold a sense of mystery but come alive when filled with people and their rhythms. The pandemic completed inverted our sense of what a place of assembly is, with gatherings taking place in external spaces, under trees, by the quayside. This was a big cultural change for Irish people! And then you introduced the theme of the Citizens’ Assembly as a more political lens on these issues.
LN: Yes, when thinking about assembly in an Irish context the example of the Citizens’ Assembly was impossible to avoid. We’ll talk more about this in a minute but when we introduced this theme it was a way of saying: here is a particular model of assembly that has been celebrated at home and internationally. What can we learn from it if we approach it through a lens of design? How could we translate its principles into an architectural form? Can you talk a bit about what other concerns guided the design process?
LC: At the very outset we looked to models of structures within structures, for example traditional choirstalls (in a cathedral setting) which are generally beautifully made timber constructions for song. This format was seen as too rigid for an exhibition with its transient, mobile visitors. Round forms emerged to the fore, for the purity of space and potential for communication. Images of cattle marts were a recurring point of reference: these round spaces animated by the chant of the auctioneer and the glances of the traders. The next step was to consider the materiality of the structure, using lean sections of Irish hardwood. The modularity of the piece was essential for the practical demands of installation, shipping and reinstallation, but it is also important conceptually. We conceived of the structure as something mobile, a prototype that could be iterated in different kinds of public space beyond its installation in Venice.
For a long time, this circular drum was lined inside and out with apertures for the speakers which were buried in the walls. After intense debate, the walls came off the external circumference, revealing a threedimensional structure that supports the interior space. The shape of this was inflected to a conical form, enhancing the spatial experience and intensity of the sound. The speaker boxes are now exposed outside, with an almost human presence we think.
I feel that in this era of the virtual, it is crucial for us to experience time and space as a tangible, physical thing, and to actively listen to our environment and to each other.
LN: That act of revealing the external structure turned out to be very important, as it introduced an element of reflexivity. It was about laying bare the process, which is a modernist gesture: indeed, for me the exposed armature recalls Constructivist precedents from post-revolutionary Russia, like Alexandr Rodchenko’s worker’s club or Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, which like our project were predicated on the conviction that new forms of politics also demanded new architectural typologies. And once this reflexive dimension was introduced it took on a life of its own. Michelle started to produce a film that documented the making of the pavilion as well as a poem that follows the making of Assembly from sketch to tree to structure. That poem is woven through the heart of David’s composition, which also incorporates recorded sounds of the construction process made for the documentary film: Robert Morris’s tautological 1961 artwork Box with the Sound of Its Own Making was a reference point here. That iterative dimension became central to the project. We started thinking of assembly itself as a process, one that is animated by feedback, by recursive and transparent circuits of information. David, you have often worked at the intersection of space and sound. How did collaborating with architects affect your process?
DS: It has helped me to create work that is at the same time highly conceptual and process led. I really appreciated the holistic mode of thinking of the greater picture, of the individual parts being connected to a greater whole. The spatial qualities of sound always have been an important part of my practice, and being able to collaboratively design a purpose-built listening space was a unique opportunity to realise that.
LN: Can you talk a bit about how you went about collecting sounds? What guided that process? How did you envision them working together?
DS: I applied the concept of assembly in the broadest sense possible to discover sound material in different locations throughout Ireland. I was guided by my curiosity and by thoughts about sounds of nature and of people interacting with their natural environment as well as with each other. Then there were the mechanical sounds (the sounds of human-made assemblies), like the tools for making our installation structure or traffic sounds, which became an important element of the interior composition. Last but not least, the processes of the Citizen's Assembly, and the poems (assemblies of phonemes into words into sentences) crystallised as major points of inspiration for the compositional structure. I envisioned all the elements working together right from the beginning of the development process, becoming like a portrait of democracy that doesn't try to criticise or discriminate against the discordance of noise, but instead engages with it, embracing polyphony and showing the possibility of music.
LN: Louise, has this type of collaboration changed how you have worked?
LC:
The process of making with Alan Meredith and Ceadogán Rugmakers and the installation with Space Forms,
Working with David and Michelle on sound and words has been very fruitful, introducing new dimensions to the design process than those involved in a more functional building program. The process of making with Alan Meredith and Ceadogán Rugmakers and the installation with Space Forms, who are so creative around the logistics has meant that there was no time, it seems, when the creative process was not continually evolving and offering new opportunities for reflection.
LN: Michelle as part of research for the composition you interviewed six people involved in the Citizens’ Assembly: academics, civil servants, participants. What did you learn?
MD: Through those conversations, I discovered how pioneering Ireland is with this democratic deliberation model, having a noted influence internationally. If this influence reflexively leads to more localised "sub-structures" of models across Ireland, our overall democratic system would strengthen, becoming more inclusive, more agile, and better equipped to navigate societal decisions. The success of the Citizens’ Assembly at a national level should give encouragement to those at a local level looking for more effective ways to involve members of the public in solving problems and resolving issues in their communities. The Citizens' Assembly encourages this and recognises certain limitations with operating only at a national scale, which, at times, has been unjustly linked to political agendas it operates independently of.
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Listen: RTÉ Arena on Assembly at the Venice Bienale
LN: I think for all of us a key moment was talking to Cathal O’Regan of the Department of the Taoiseach and learning about how much thought went into organising how both people and information circulated during a Citizens’ Assembly. How each iteration modulated its procedures based on feedback from the previous ones. It’s not a readymade solution to the world’s ills but it is an iterative process that learns from itself. This is bureaucracy, yes, but it’s also a craft. Assemblies of whatever kind—even the most spontaneous, informal ones—are products of human intelligence, of design broadly conceived. And they are also vehicles for the dissemination, the cross-pollination, the proliferation of intelligence—of ideas—in turn.
LC: For me the Citizens’ Assembly that was most intriguing was the one on Biodiversity Loss from 2022. This iteration presented new challenges, because it was much broader in scope than previous Assemblies which largely handled specific constitutional issues: it tackled problems that cannot just be confined to an Irish or even human perspective. What kind of assembly could incorporate the voices of animals, plants, and so on? We wanted Assembly to be sustainable, so building it from timber was the natural choice, but the biography of the material became integral to the process. All our timber came from two beech trees that fell in a storm. They were harvested and seasoned by Alan Meredith, who fabricated the structure. The frequency and intensity of storms has increased greatly in recent years due to climate change, and so the making of the pavilion was woven into this larger story of disrupted weather systems and ecological cycles.
Louise Cotter, David Naessens, Michelle Delea and Alan Meredith
DS: In the soundscape, I also included very quiet sounds not usually audible to the human ear: processes of growth and decay in the soil; the clicking sounds of white-clawed crayfish, an endangered species of sweetwater crustacean inhabiting our local lake in the Irish midlands; the xylem flowing through a live tree; the rustling of branches and leaves amplified its trunk. It was important for me to think about processes of assembly not only in a human sense but also in the more-than-human world, with cycles that correspond to our creative process.
It was important for us to really present the project in a material, embodied way: as a space animated by sound, not just as information or data, nor as an empty 1:1 model. Why was this? How have issues of embodiment, phenomenology, space, and time played into your work on Assembly?
DS: I feel that in this era of the virtual, it is crucial for us to experience time and space as a tangible, physical thing, and to actively listen to our environment and to each other. It was also important for me to consciously integrate the loudspeaker as a physical object and transmitter of sound waves into the installation design.
LC: From the beginning it was important that the piece was a phenomenologically rich, sensorial experience and that the materials were handcrafted and sensuous, just as choirstalls have that burnished quality, polished and worn by many hands. Architecture exhibitions are often very research focused, with lots of reading and text. Here we offer a space for visitors to experience the installation as embodied beings, with their senses and memories. We do not demand any particular interaction from visitors: they are free to reflect and sit with strangers in slow time. Sound animates the space progressing in the round over time, modified and tuned by the enclosure which is conceived as a resonant instrument.
Assembly by Cotter & Naessens Architects for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale runs until 23 November, followed by a national tour in 2026 - find out more here.
