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- [00:10]
A
Walking the walk is important for any organization hoping to preserve not just the built environment, but the traditional tools and techniques that created that environment in the first place. And the assembly House, which was created in a decommissioned 19th century church in the US city of Buffalo, is doing just that. You're listening to Tall Stories, a monocle production brought to you by the team behind the Urbanist. I'm Andrew Tuck. In this episode, the founder and director of Assembly House, Dennis Marr, tells us how the project is leading by example when it comes to preservation in our cities.
- [00:54]
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The assembly House is the transformation of a 19th century church originally built in the 1860s. So when you walk in the door, you're coming into an environment that is a former ceremonial space. It was later renovated in the 1890s to add Neo Gothic flourishes to it and was abandoned in the early 2000s. But the interior, you're seeing many installations, things that look like buildings and parts of buildings, rooms that are phantasmagoric and dreamlike in their construction, which are all assembled to present displays of building materials, of architectural objects, drawings reimagined and historic. And the entire environment is resonating against the traces of the church's past life. So things like the Gothic stained glass windows and the soaring arches, the exposed wood trusses of the ceiling, the bits of crumbling plaster, all of these pieces of the building, the ornate woodwork, are kind of in dialogue with the new spaces being built inside. I think of the assembly house as a dream world for the building arts. I'm designing it in order to put people in touch with things that we're losing touch with, with materials, with tools, with history, with one another. Everything in the building is being designed and built with people who are learning hands on skills of construction. All the environments are facilitated through construction trades, training programs that we run, and through interactions with university students. And the overarching idea is to create this kind of mini city where people can learn skills of building, can draw inspiration from the space, and then go out into the world and make things happen there. I'm very interested in the idea of buildings as ever evolving things, the flows of material and people in time. This is very different from an ordinary construction project because ordinarily you try to spend the least amount of money in the shortest amount of time to get something done. And this is more about an extended evolution, building and rebuilding and unbuilding, doing it again and again. And as we build and the various parts are coming into focus, there are installations that have been up for a very long time, other things which Come down and get replaced. It really celebrating the movements in cities, the constant changes, the ebbs and flows, and relating to that process very directly through the projects that are built and unbuilt inside. Preservation is often about making something still or fixing a moment in time. So if we're embracing the movements of materials, the contributions of people, the preservation of skills, what does that mean for the discipline of preservation and building as an object is certainly very important. But if you begin to think about it as consisting of all these subtly moving pieces, including the skill sets and the experimental attitude that gave birth to such a site, thinking about the ways that we could preserve those things. So then it becomes a much more nuanced project. I think there was at the onset some skepticism as to how aggressively we were treating some of the constituent parts of the building. But I think that over time it's been very rewarding to see the levels of appreciation that come, you know, as you walk through when you see the antique tools inside the space and begin to understand that we are preserving moments in time and trying to recover aspects of that inside. The preservation ideas are much greater than the building itself. We are living in a world which is increasingly detached from physical things. And it's going to be increasingly important to put people back in touch with things, with that embodied knowledge and learning that comes from physical experience, that comes from the direct connection to the hands. Nowadays, especially with the rise of AI and the level of disconnect we have between the physical surroundings, it's paramount to recover forms of connection. So we do that by transmitting the hands on skills to people who are learning how to build things, who are coming into contact with things, being able to connect with the installations, the various environments that have been built. What we see then is a discovery, a rediscovery of forms of bodily engagement and knowledge that are essential to shaping the human personality. People come to the assembly house to participate in the construction skills training programs, to come as tourists, to experience the space, as curiosity seekers, as cultural enthusiasts. We're bringing people from many different walks of life to connect with it, both as a cultural experience, but also as an educational experience. So it's bringing together ideas about art, design, construction, preservation in a way that is, I hope, allowing the larger public to connect to design and architecture in more accessible ways. That's increasingly important too, to be able to have a relatable form of experience that transmits a joy, an enthusiasm and a delight for the built environment.
- [06:29]
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Tall Stories is a monocle production from the team behind the Urbanist and my thanks to our guest for this edition, Dennis Marr. This episode was produced and edited by David Stevens. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to receive new episodes every week. I'm Andrew Tuck. Goodbye and thank you for listening City covers.
- [06:50]
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Sam.