Cotter & Naessens Architects: Assembly

“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.”

Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council is delighted to present Assembly, a multi-sensory installation curated by Cotter & Naessens Architects for the Irish Pavilion at the 19th International Venice Architecture Biennale.

Assembly 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 will be a multi-sensory installation that offers visitors a soundscape to be inhabited and a space to be heard.

In 2016 Ireland established its first Citizens’ Assembly. 99 demographically representative Irish residents are brought together to deliberate issues ranging from marriage equality to biodiversity loss, collectively producing recommendations for implementation by government. This ongoing political experiment has been promoted as an innovative form of participatory democracy, meant to bring the ordinary “citizen” closer to the processes of governance. Assembly asks how architecture can contribute to, and learn from, this political experiment. The pavilion will present a speculative prototype for a structure to facilitate non-hierarchical communication between strangers. Its concept and structure has been informed by spatial typologies of political and social assembly from Ireland and abroad, including choir stalls, parliaments, and cattle marts. 

Functionally and poetically, the pavilion reflects on assembly as a product and process of making. Harnessing age-old, renewable materials, skills and collaborative wisdom, Assembly has been hand-crafted from Irish beech trees sourced and seasoned by woodworker Alan Meredith and will feature a carpet handwoven by Ceadogán Rugmakers to welcome visitors into its interior. A chorus of soundboxes integrated within its structure will each deliver a fragment of a spatialized and polyphonic composition informed by the Venetian tradition of cori spezzati. A collaboration by Michelle Delea and David Stalling, the audio composition incorporates music, poetry, interviews with the Citizens’ Assembly’s designers and participants, and recordings that reflexively document the structure’s own fabrication. 

Conceived as a resonant instrument designed to harmonise a multitude of dissonant voices, Assembly will only fully come alive when inhabited by people, adding a further, endlessly plural layer of sound. Likewise, its structure is animated by the experiences and responses of its visitors. 

“Our aim is for architecture to work in tandem with other crafts and knowledge forms—from woodwork, textiles, poetry, art and music through to the ecological and the political—so as to create a rich sensory environment that encourages awareness of ourselves and of others as embodied beings. Ultimately, Assembly is about bringing people together in a space that encourages respect for one another as individuals, each with the perspectives of their own lived histories and the potential to imagine new ways of gathering, listening and communicating.”

—Louise Cotter, Cotter & Naessens Architects

Ireland at Venice is an initiative of Culture Ireland in partnership with the Arts Council of Ireland. The Arts Council supports the national tour of Assembly in 2026.

With support from: Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, Dublin City Council, Cork City Council, Cork County Council, Laois County Council |Creative Ireland Laois, Jacobs Engineering, Cork Centre for Architectural Education, Henry J  Lyons and United Hardware; and Technical support from Ceadogán Rugs, Punch Consulting Engineers, iGuzzini, Innosonix.

Cotter & Naessens are an architecture and design studio based in Cork City since 2001 and founded by Louise Cotter and David Naessens. Their work is focused on public projects and is informed by design research, through teaching and design competitions, notably dlrLexicon in Dun Laoghaire and most recently the FOCAS Research Institute, Technical University Dublin. Cotter & Naessens were one of 16 practices invited to participate in Close Encounters, which was a commission for the Biennale Architettura 2018, Freespace, curated by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. Louise Cotter and David Naessens also participated in one of the first International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Aldo Rossi in 1985. The work of the practice has been nominated twice for the EU Mies Award and in 2016 dlrLexicon received the RIBA Award for International Excellence, and the RIAI Awards for Best Public Building and Best Cultural Building in 2015.