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Anna Cassidy

As the days shorten and the evenings darken, we are drawn to one another: into steamed-up kitchens and packed lecture theatres, onto leaf-strewn streets, and across blanket-covered couches. These events ask what it takes for people to gather, and what part place and space play in making that possible. The question is not only whether we’ll come together, but in what kind of rooms, and who we’ll make room for when we do. 

At the heart of the month is Assembly, Cotter & Naessens’ Irish pavilion from the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, in Áras Mhic Dhiarmada / Busáras until 22 November as part of Cultúr 2026. In a building made for arriving and leaving, this multisensory installation, a small circular room of Irish beech, invites people to enter, sit, listen and depart. Around it a programme of conversations considers what it means to share space, from housing and life in the Gaeltacht to the Traveller experience with Pavee Point and poetry with Poetry Ireland. The gathering then moves outdoors to NCAD FIELD for its annual potato harvest, before returning for a final get-together on 22 November. Throughout, tours open up the wonderful Busáras itself. 

At NCAD, Becoming Terrestrial (3–4 November) turns to the ground beneath our feet and the places we inhabit. This conference asks what it means for cultural, educational and community spaces to become places of ecological repair. Questions of care, maintenance and sustainability come into view, among the slower rhythms of growth and change. From the soil in which plants take root to the seasons we all weather, the conference considers what it means to care for the places that sustain us. 

In Belfast, Dr Jane Hall gives the Peter Rice Lecture at Queen’s University (3 November). Hall is a founding member of Assemble, the London-based collective working across architecture, design and art. Assemble began with a few friends in their early twenties, meeting in a pub to imagine what they might build together, until someone suggested they “just build something”. What followed was a cinema in a disused petrol station and a folly beneath a motorway, made by friends who, by Hall’s own admission, weren’t entirely sure what they were doing. In 2015, Assemble went on to win the Turner Prize for its work with residents on Granby Four Streets in Liverpool. Through her books Breaking Ground and Woman Made, Hall has widened the story of who gets to design. A lecture not to miss! 

A momentous few weeks for Emma Gilleece, the architectural historian whose 100 Buildings series for RTÉ Culture has drawn out the history layered into the streetscapes and argued for buildings often overlooked. Since my student days, her writing has taught me to notice the things around me. On a sleepy Sunday (8 November), she leads This Modern Love, a Dublin Book Festival walking tour of the modernist city drawn from her new book of the same title, a must-read should you want to keep walking long after the tour ends. 

The Architectural Association of Ireland’s Social Inclusivity in Architecture series, in collaboration with Trinity College, welcomes MGNÉ Architects (12 November), a practice whose work spans social housing, schools and community buildings, places shaped by the everyday needs of the people who use them. Among its projects are a special educational needs school in Letterkenny and the Rutland Street community hub for Dublin City Council. Different in scale and purpose, both speak to architecture’s capacity to offer more than shelter: to create the conditions for people to meet, belong and feel part of something. 

Finally, November brings Irish Design Week (7–14 November) around again, a week I look forward to each year. This year’s theme, Fáilte Future Europe, centres on welcome, and the traditions that shape how we make. Proper Dark, the 100 Archive 2025 Selection and Design Futures in Heritage Craft have caught my eye, each asking us to look again. 

However dreary the evenings get, November gives us a reason to gather, and to make room for one another to do just that.