Following its presentation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Ireland’s national pavilion embarks on a nationwide tour, bringing its exploration of architecture, participation and collective listening to audiences across the country.
Ireland’s contribution to the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale is returning home. Following its presentation in Venice, Assembly by Cotter & Naessens Architects will tour a series of venues and festivals across Ireland throughout 2026, inviting new audiences to experience the installation and engage with the ideas that shaped it.
Part installation, part soundscape and part civic proposition, Assembly explores architecture as a framework for gathering, listening and collective reflection. Inspired by Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly, the project considers how physical space can support dialogue, participation and democratic exchange at a time when much public discourse is increasingly fragmented and mediated through digital platforms.
Designed by Cork-based practice Cotter & Naessens Architects, the pavilion reflects on assembly as both a process of making and a condition of being together. Handcrafted from Irish beech and incorporating a carpet woven by Ceadogán Rugmakers, the installation combines renewable materials, craft and collaborative knowledge. Embedded throughout the structure, a series of soundboxes play a spatialised composition created by Michelle Delea and David Stalling, weaving together music, poetry, interviews and recordings from the pavilion’s own fabrication to create an immersive architectural environment.
The national tour begins at Cork Midsummer Festival before travelling to Galway International Arts Festival later in the summer. Further events include screenings and discussions at Dunamaise Arts Centre in Portlaoise and Architecture at the Edge in Galway. Alongside the installation, visitors will be able to view a new documentary by Michelle Delea that traces the design, making and installation of the pavilion through film and sound.
By taking the project beyond Venice and into towns and cities across Ireland, the tour extends the pavilion’s central proposition: that architecture can provide not only spaces for occupation, but also spaces for conversation, reflection and collective imagination. As Assembly moves from venue to venue, it continues to ask how the built environment might help foster more open and inclusive forms of public exchange.
