A transformation of people and place: Assembly House 150

“Preserving the sanctity of the environment, the space of the altar is now the space of making things,” Maher says. “It’s a ritual in its own right.”

Maher founded AH150 in 2014, when he bought the former Immaculate Conception Church at the corner of Edward Street and Elmwood Avenue nearly a decade after it held its last mass. Nine years later, it continues bringing people together with its innovative approach to urban development.

The nonprofit combines passions for learning, woodworking and community to create hands-on connections with physical things, empower people to improve their lives and express themselves, and cultivate an awareness for restoring and repairing.

“Churches were once these kind of community hubs, a nexus for the neighbors, but they were also a place where you could step away from the world,” Maher says. “We want to remove you from the world in kind of creating some kind of other world inside.”

Assembly House 150 is both a preservation of the church’s original construction and a boundary-stretching view of architecture. Its interior is part art and design studio, part construction trades workshop and part immersive museum. How equal those pillars are is interpreted differently by each passer-through.

“Once I walked into the church, I was kind of in awe,” says Derek Harvey, who went to the adult learning center across the street before joining SACRA, AH150’s flagship construction skill-building program. “You wouldn’t think that all this stuff is going on inside this church once you see it from the outside, but I was impressed when I was walking through. I was kind of intimidated and then impressed.”

The programming at AH150—from SACRA to Model City Builders for high schoolers—bridges skill development with a social dimension. The construction acts as a common language that wide-ranging demographics of people can connect around.

“I think of this as kind of an organism,” Maher says. “People, materials, ideations, things all forming and reforming. So, in essence, there’s kind of a liveness to the place. You don’t walk into most places and see it always shifting around, and it’s also enlivened and animated most importantly by the people that are here.”

Some people, like Harvey, are learning skills for a career change. Others, such as Izzy Roman, are using it as the foundation for their first career.

“I just feel like this is a good route for anybody that’s struggling, for real,” says Roman, a summer apprentice and recent SACRA grad. “If you’re struggling, they can get you on the right route. You just gotta put effort into it, that’s it.”

As the days and months and years pass by, it’s not only the space that transforms. The people who build and experience it do as well.

“I think it’s an important time to be doing this kind of work because we are connected to things, to tools, to the hands—a form of bodily presence and awareness that is hard to maintain these days,” Maher says. “It’s a consciousness raising, which ideally I think helps you to be aware of how you can shape your own surroundings and your own life.”

Introducing Interfield

Assembly House 150’s reach extends beyond 150 Edward St.

In April, it completed renovations on two classrooms at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, creating Interfield, an interactive installation dedicated to artmaking and education. The project allowed Maher to rehire SACRA graduates to advance their skills in artistic wall painting, furniture restoration, stained glass and furniture building.

“We’d like to be able to do more of that type of project,” Maher says. “Places where we have the opportunity to add value to another organization, business, ideally some kind of a publicly oriented site where we can work together.”