settle - a temporary architectural installation designed and curated by TRESTLE - proposes a new public interior for gathering and collective experience in the contemporary city. Inspired by the functionalism and adaptability of Irish vernacular furniture, the installation explores how an infrastructure of considered objects can formulate a new, albeit temporary, public interior. The installation can be recast and reformatted to host a variety of events and gatherings – in this way it acts as an extended invitation to the city. The installation was photographed by Willem Pab in St Luke’s crypt, Cork City, where it was showcased in summer 2026. It has subsequently been temporarily installed at Architecture at the Edge Festival in Galway, Ireland.
settle is a provocation to reimagine the public interior as a catalyst for collective experience within the modern city. Hannah Arendt spoke of the dangers of an entirely private life – and the importance of being related to and separated from others through the intermediary of ‘a common world of things’. We see the public interior as a critical element of this world. settle is a reaction against modern capitalist structures which prioritise the individual above all else – devaluing the collective spaces human beings inhabit together. With our lives increasingly occupying the digital commons, the tangibility of considered, dignified, and situated public rooms is an increasingly rare phenomenon within daily life.
With this in mind, settle proposes an architecture of civic interiority. It explores ideas of the prototypical public interior that interest us – spatial order, threshold, material character, repetition and variation – and tests how these can be generated through a moveable material arrangement of objects and gestures. In the context of a climate emergency, we consider it imperative to reuse buildings that already exist. We wish to explore how an infrastructure of considered and functional objects can formulate a new, albeit temporary, public interior that invites occupation and use.
The project was the recipient of a 2026 Arts Council of Ireland Architecture Project Award.
