Ireland

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.
The product of an interdisciplinary collaboration between architects, a composer, a poet, and a woodworker, Assembly is a prototype for a structure that facilitates non-hierarchical communication between strangers. Circular, modular, and small in scale, it can be inserted into public spaces, from schools to shopping centres, transforming them into sites of civic participation. Its resonant voids house a chorus of soundboxes, each delivering a fragment of a polyphonic soundscape incorporating music, poetry, interviews with the Citizens’ Assembly’s designers and participants, and recordings that reflexively document the structure’s own fabrication. An instrument designed to harmonise a multitude of dissonant voices, the pavilion reflects on assembly as both a product and a process of making.