Common Treasures 2 with Amica Dall of Assemble

Join Amica Dall, one of the founding members of Turner prize winning Assemble, to discuss Common Treasures 2. Assemble is a London-based organisation who design and make buildings, artworks, gardens, playgrounds, furniture, exhibitions and events, all of which form an interconnected body of work. 

This anthology, the second in the Common Treasures project, developed from a series of conversations between the architecture collective Assemble and the arts organisation Common Ground. It takes as its premise the idea that approaches to housing that are grounded in greater levels of community ownership, management and maintenance have the potential to empower communities, overcome the opposition to local development and create conditions in which skilled rural workers are part of stronger local networks of industry and agriculture. Housing built by, for and with the people who live in it makes characterful neighbourhoods that last well, are able to be maintained by their residents and facilitate investment in local labour, materials and skilled workmanship. The contributors to this anthology share their work to overcome the many obstacles to this way of working, and offer a vision which is grounded, imaginative and hopeful.

Amica Dall is co-founder of Common Treasures, a new organisation interested in farming, rural culture and the relationship between architecture and agriculture. She is a writer and researcher concerned with architecture and design culture, particularly how working practices can be adjusted to generate less harmful social and environmental outcomes, and alongside this, she has an artistic practice producing spaces, objects and exhibitions with children. She was a co-founder of Assemble, with whom she worked from 2010 - 2022. During that time, Assemble won the 2015 Turner Prize and the 2016 UN Prize for Sustainable Design, and along with other founders, she was nominated to the Royal Academy in 2023. She is a trustee and founder of Baltic Street Adventure Playground, and is a regular collaborator of Material Cultures, with whom she wrote Material Reform (MACK, 2023). Since 2019, she has been a lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, where she teaches on MA Situated Practice.