settle
settle is a temporary installation designed and curated by TRESTLE.
The project 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.
settle is the recipient of a 2026 Arts Council Architecture Project Award and ran in Cork City from 29 July – 8 August 2026 with a programme of events. settle was also subsequently exhibited at Architecture at the Edge Festival in Galway. To read more about the individual furniture pieces please follow this link.
All photographs copyright of Willem Pab. Fabrication by Stevan Hartung.
The project has been featured internationally by afasia, AnInterior, Archello, designboom, divisare, FRAME and This is Paper.
Events included a public lecture by Patrick Lynch of Lynch Architects in collaboration with the Architectural Association of Ireland (AAI), a public lecture with fuinneamh workshop, a shared reading event with Jennie Moran, and a talk by Eoghan Daltun on rewilding and nature restoration. Each of these events tested a varying deployment of the furniture pieces.
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.
We were drawn to the ingenious furnishings of Irish rural domestic interiors. Borne of harsh economic realities – furniture elements were conceived as functional and adaptable objects which were rarely used for a single purpose.
Some examples include falling tables, which were hinged to adjacent walls, and dressers used to divide space. Characterful settle beds - ‘Upright, rudimentary, unshiftably planked’, in Heaney’s words - were used interchangeably as storage, sleeping or seating elements. JM Synge observed that these objects ‘seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them’.
