Grafton Architects   Ireland   From its original location, the University of Limerick has expanded over the years and is now situated on both sides of the River Shannon, the longest and largest in Ireland. The University’s expansion provided the location for the new Medical School

Grafton Architects   Ireland   On the northwestern edge of the Belfield campus of the University College Dublin, the Urban Institute joins an original collection of mainly 19th century Masonic School buildings – now called Richview – which are loosely organized around a lime tree

Grafton Architects   Ireland   This is a part of the Dublin coastal area beloved of James Joyce and immortalized in Ulysses. Located overlooking Dublin Bay, with Booterstown Marsh at its south-eastern boundary, and a frontage onto the main road connecting the sea port of Dun Laogh

Grafton Architects   France   The masterplan for this plateau proposed boulevards, streets, and squares with the poetic integration of landscape and ecology. It referred to the legacy of the great tradition of institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard, which were reinte

Grafton Architects   Ireland   The site for the new house for the President of the Limerick University in the west of Ireland was chosen to be on lands across the river Shannon. Using traditional techniques, the house sits alone in the landscape establishing a relationship with th

Grafton Architects   Ireland   Capital City. Symbolically the most important urban space in Dublin, it was widened in the 18th century and rebuilt after the destruction caused in the uprising of 1916 and the Civil War of 1922. O’Connell Street as a whole has existed in a constant

Grafton Architects   Ireland   The Library is the most democratic institution in our society today, a free space where knowledge and resources are exchanged unconditionally, a space open to all nationalities and social classes. This welcoming and public character marked the starti

Grafton Architects   Ireland   In the 1960s, the construction of the head offices for the National Electricity Supply Board involved demolishing sixteen 18th century houses. This was a controversial act since the continuity of the unique ‘Georgian mile’ of Fitzwilliam Street facad

Grafton Architects   Ireland   The Commissioners of Public Works developed this new building to house the Department of Finance. It is the first new Government Department Building completed in Dublin since 1939. The project incorporated a link into the adjacent Government Building

Grafton Architects   South Korea   The client’s vision was interpreted as a wish to make a school of joy, discovery, safety, and belonging; to make a community, a home where all social and academic skills are learned; to make a place, which would act as a center for surrounding commun

Grafton Architects   United Kingdom   Lincoln’s inn Fields has a unique status in the City of London. This site is situated on the ‘shoreline’ between dense city fabric and the open landscape of the fields. The building form embraces both, proposing a generous un-programmed space at grou

Grafton Architects   France   Originally a Celtic city, Toulouse, the capital of the southern Occitane Region of France, is known today as La Ville Rose – The Pink City – because of the terracotta brick of the city’s buildings. The School of Economics is positioned on a key site,

Grafton Architects   United States   Our architectural strategy for this competition was to conceive of the new building as ‘A Story Book of Timber’ where timber would act as both the structural bones and the enclosing skin. Responding to the local climate, we proposed a canopy of light

Grafton Architects   United Kingdom   A warehouse of ideas, a labyrinth of interlocking volumes, layers of welcome joining community and university, Town House came into existence born of Kingston University’s progressive educational vision. In this building, sound and silence, exuberant

Grafton Architects   Peru   The unique condition of Lima, its relationship to the Pacific Ocean, with 40m-high cliffs defining the boundary between the city and the sea, was a starting point in the conception of this project. The infrastructure for learning is imagined as a ‘ne

Grafton Architects   Italy   The brief for this university building was seen as an opportunity to address the throbbing urban life of Milan, and at the same time make a space at the scale of the city, woven into its mesh. Furthermore, the bold volume, a sort of rock clad with lo

Grafton Architects   Architecture must question itself continually so that it can respond with diligence and optimism to a reality in constant flux. 

From their Dublin-based studio, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara – Grafton Architects – rethink urban landscapes and study the relevance of contemporary architecture. Over more than forty years of practice, the studio has completed, in Ireland and

Stanislaus von Moos   Coherent and essential, the bold structures by Grafton establish a direct dialogue with the physical, historic, and cultural context surrounding them.

Luis Fernández-Galiano   Yvonne Farrell (Tullamore, 1951) and Shelley McNamara (Lisdoonvarna, 1952) both graduated in 1974 from University College Dublin, where they taught between 1976 and 2002, and in 1977 started their studio on a main street of the Irish capital that wou

Kingston University Town House Conferred every year by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), the Stirling Prize is a recognition of the best new buildings raised in the United Kingdom. The 2021 winner was Kingston University London – Town

The Pritzker Architecture Prize   The video, produced in lieu of an in-person ceremony for the first time in the 42-year history of the award, discusses the meaning of the Prize, reveals the Laureates’ intimate reflections on architecture, and includes a personal message to embolden

Grafton Architects  The Gold Medal of the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) is the maximum distinction that can be given to a professional in the field in the United Kingdom, and it went to Grafton Architects, the office led by Yvonne Farr

Soon after the Dublin-based Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara learned that they had come away with the 2010 Pritzker Prize (see Arquitectura Viva 223), it was announced that their firm, Grafton Architects, had carried the day in the competition for

The social coherence and commitment demonstrated by Grafton Architects, established in 1978, in Dublin, by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, has garnered this year’s Pritzker Prize, the first ever to be conferred on a partnership of women. Arquite

Antonio Lucas   Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara were brainstorming for a name for their studio. It was 1978. They combined their surnames, switched their names around, sometimes drifting toward a more abstract or poetic formulation to go by as an architectural d

Brutalism with a friendly countenance: this is how one might venture to describe the architecture that Grafton Architects – Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara – have been carrying out for the past twenty years in Ireland, Europe, and America, from t

In 2020, for the first time in the history of the award, the Hyatt Foundation gave the Pritzker Prize to a tandem of women: the Irish firm Grafton Architects. The work of Yvonne Farrell (1951) and Shelley McNamara (1952) – in joint practice since 197

Richard Ingersoll   The optimistic view of ‘Freespace’, a concept promoted by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, better known as Grafton Architects and this year’s Biennale curators, is that architecture can be generous while serving utilitarian functions. Leon Battis

The board of the Venice Biennale, chaired by Paola Baratta, has announced that Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (Grafton Architects) will be curating the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, set to be held from 26 May to 25 November 2018. A