Entry No. 24 — the Buffalo file — filed under: art
Assembly House 150
Since 2014, artist Dennis Maher has been turning the former Immaculate Conception church at Edward and Elmwood into a continuously mutating interior of salvaged fragments and dream-logic carpentry — part art studio, part construction-trades workshop, part immersive museum, with the old altar deliberately preserved as what he calls 'the space of making things.' The building is also home to SACRA, a construction skills program whose trainees do much of the actual building, which is why the place never looks the same twice; Maher describes it as 'kind of an organism.' You walk through it on a guided tour, surrounded by whatever the apprentices assembled that month.
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The story
Immaculate Conception went up at Edward Street and Elmwood Avenue in 1856: Gothic Revival, with rusticated Medina sandstone additions, stained glass out of the Zettler studio, and work by the architectural firm Lansing and Beierl. The parish is gone. What is in the church now is the doing of Dennis Maher, an artist and architect who established Assembly House 150 as a nonprofit in 2014 to make the building, in the organization's words, a site for the public imagination of the building arts. Its stated mission is plainer than that: restore connections to tools, materials, and one another.
Physically it is an art and design studio, a construction trades workshop, a woodshop and an immersive museum occupying the same nave at once, thick with salvaged fragments assembled into structures that read as architecture rather than sculpture and then get taken apart again. The altar was deliberately kept and put to work. "Preserving the sanctity of the environment, the space of the altar is now the space of making things," Maher has said. "It's a ritual in its own right." Elsewhere he describes the whole enterprise as "kind of an organism. People, materials, ideations, things all forming and reforming."
The reason it keeps reforming is SACRA — the Society for the Advancement of Construction Related Arts — a twelve-week construction skills program launched in 2017 in collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, running two cohorts a year. Trainees build much of what you walk through. Model City Builders followed in 2021 for high schoolers, an in-house craft apprenticeship in 2022, and the shop has produced work beyond the walls, including the Interfield installation for the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Nothing here is finished, which is the point.
What it's like
There are no drop-ins: you book a noon slot online and ring the bell at 150 Edward. What follows is a guided walk through rooms crowded with doors, banisters, spindles, organ pipe and offcut, arranged into passages and towers that were not there last season and will not be there next. It is an active workshop with people working in it, so expect sawdust, tools laid out mid-job, and a route that bends around whatever is currently being built. Ask questions, because the guides can tell you which apprentice made which thing and why it is coming down in March; touch nothing without asking first. Dress like you are visiting a job site, because you are, and leave the good shoes at home.
The move: Book two spots on the second-Saturday noon tour through their site, then walk the few blocks into Allentown for lunch and argue about which of the staircases were load-bearing and which were sculpture.
📍 Before you go Public tours only on the second Friday and Saturday of each month at noon, April through November — book in advance through the scheduling link on assemblyhouse150.org. Private artist-led tours exist but want about two months' notice; multi-site group tours need 10+ people and six weeks. It's an active workshop, so dress for sawdust.
- 📍 Buffalo
- 💸 $$
- ⚡ Up for anything
- 🌗 Indoors
Where: 150 Edward St, Buffalo, NY 14201
Hours: Added 2026-08-25 — confirm current hours before you go.
⚠ Seasonal or scheduled — always check before you go.
Pair it with
- Buffalo Religious Arts Center — The exact inverse, ten minutes north in Black Rock: another deconsecrated Buffalo church, but one that fills itself with salvage from other closed churches rather than tearing its own interior apart and rebuilding it.
- The Flo — Three blocks away on Allen Street, and the sensory opposite of a room full of power tools — an afternoon of sawdust and organ pipes followed by an hour in a lightless tank of Epsom salt.
- The Foundry — Buffalo's other building stuffed with woodshop, metalshop and people making things, a short drive up to Northampton Street — same instinct, different theory about what a workshop is for.
More weird in Buffalo
Good to know
When can I actually get in?
Public tours run the second Friday and the second Saturday of each month at noon, April through November, and you book them through the scheduling link on assemblyhouse150.org. That is the whole public window — there is no walk-up option, and the season genuinely stops for winter.
Can I get a private or artist-led tour?
Artist-led tours with Dennis Maher want about two months' notice, and the three-hour Assembled City tour — the Assembly House plus project sites and the Fargo House — needs at least ten people and six weeks. Both have been listed as on hold at points, so email [email protected] or call 716-560-8170 before planning around one.
Where is it and where do I park?
150 Edward Street, at the Elmwood Avenue corner on the eastern edge of Allentown. Street parking in the surrounding blocks, and Allen Street's restaurants are a few minutes' walk, which is the natural second half of the outing.
Is it accessible?
It is a 19th-century church converted into a working shop, with a choir loft and changes of level built into both the original structure and whatever the trainees have added. Access varies with what is currently installed, so raise it when you book rather than on the doorstep.
Will it look the same as the photos I've seen?
Almost certainly not. Two SACRA cohorts a year build and dismantle inside the space, and Maher's own framing is that it is an organism. Photographs from a previous season are a record of a room that no longer exists.
Plan a visit & invite your people →
Further reading: Official site · buffalo.com
last checked: 2026-08-25