15 years of Assemble, the community-driven British architecture collective

In new book Assemble: Building Collective (Thames & Hudson), architecture critic Aaron Betsky offers readers a compelling retrospective of the past 15 years of the Turner Prize-winning multidisciplinary architecture collective. Known for its deeply collaborative and community-driven approach, Assemble’s journey is detailed over seven chapters, illustrated with engaging photography, creative architectural drawings, and the collective’s own voices.

Flicking through Assemble’s book

In a similar way to how the collective often delivers its projects, the book begins with an introduction that zooms out to analyse the context and community within which it exists. Betsky notes that Assemble emerged from a time when new approaches to architecture were being explored that were ‘deeply rooted in British traditions but were also addressing global issues’: it's a clear theme that runs through all of Assemble’s work to date.

Each chapter highlights the steps in this journey so far, starting with the collective's very first project, a bombastic self-initiated pop-up cinema in a disused petrol station in Clerkenwell, London: The Cineroleum. From the industrious buzz of Sugar House Studios, where the collective made its own studio and workshop, to the playful reinvention of The Brutalist Playground exhibition at RIBA and the hands-on making of Granby Winter Garden, a dramatic community space in Liverpool, readers are invited deep into the stories, challenges, and triumphs behind Assemble’s most distinctive works.

Space is also given to projects that are less well known in the collectives’ oeuvre, including the DH Chen Foundation Gallery, the Bell Square Pavilion, and the colourful Kamikatz Brewery, one of Assemble's earliest international projects, in Shikoku Island, Japan. The group's creativity and ability to jump into projects with joyful creativity shine through, as does the impact of the experiences its members gain from each temporary space they insert into urban landscapes.

Surprisingly, the book doesn’t shy away from the projects that Assemble hasn’t fully realised, which is a refreshing retort to the polished monographs that often present a perfect view of a practice’s history; here, instead, you'll find highlighted the real-world problems of delivering complex and boundary-pushing schemes.

The last chapter, ‘Still Assembling’, goes further to hint at how the collective will change in the future; Assemble is an unfinished project, yet its greatest work may be the collective itself. It's a structure that is constantly evolving, building not just spaces, but new and exciting ways of making them.