‘Dublin: The City That Travels With Us’ …
Design Week Dublin (DWD) was delighted to partner with the RIAI for a special event with Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of Grafton Architects. Working with a talented team from their Dublin base, these two remarkable women have taken the architecture world by storm, having taken their unique design approach to cities across Ireland, Europe and the world.
To a packed auditorium, Sandra O’Connell, Director of Architecture and Communications, RIAI, welcomed guests on behalf of DWD founders Jane and Sarah McDonnell, and mentioned just some of Grafton Architects’ many awards and recognitions, including the Pritzker Prize, considered architecture’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize. She said: “Yvonne and Shelley are far too humble to want me to list all their accolades, but I think it’s important to mention what they have achieved on behalf of Irish architecture and why the wider design community in Ireland is so incredibly proud of them.”
They were awarded the RIAI Gandon Medal for Lifetime Achievement and the RIAI Gold Medal for Bocconi University in Milan. They also received the Downes Medal from the Irish Architectural Association, the Ulysses Medal from UCD and they are also elected members of Aosdána. Laureates of the Royal Gold Medal, the highest honour given by the Royal Institute of British Architects, their engineering university, UTEC in Lima, received the inaugural RIBA International Prize. They also won the prestigious RIBA Stirling Prize and the European Union Architecture Prize, the EUmies Award. Grafton Architects curated Venice Biennale 2018, the largest architecture festival in the world. They received the Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture from the University of Virginia. Now both professors in the Accademia d’Archittettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland, they previously held the Kenzo Tange chair at GSD Harvard and the Louis Kahn chair at Yale University.
Yvonne began the presentation with an early map of Dublin, tracing the development of narrow plots, lanes, courtyards, streets and the architect’s role in “finding a form” in relation to site. She described the “act of reparation” that was Grafton’s redevelopment of the ESB site on Fitzwilliam Street Lower, referring to the “crust of brick” and likening the rhythms of the scheme – the colonnades, doors, windows and courtyard gardens – to those of a musical score. “The earth is our client,” she said. “Architecture is a global language and construction is culture.” She went on to describe Grafton’s ongoing public space project in Dublin port and East Wall Road, referring to inspiration from Barcelona where, she says, such a concept “would be civilised with landscape”: “We have to put the landscape and ecosystem first, so buildings sit quietly in [this] sensitive place.”
Dublin is the adopted city of these internationally renowned architects, with Yvonne from Tullamore in Co Offaly and Shelley from Lisdoonvarna in Co Clare. Studying architecture in the heart of the city, after graduating in 1974 they set up their studio in an attic on Grafton Street in 1978, with city life flowing all around them. They participated in teaching, research and exhibitions to explore new ways of making better cities for people.
Together with other young architects, they took on vacancy and dereliction in the Liberties – a challenge that has not gone away – and, forming part of a consortium of eight practices, went on to win the Temple Bar Framework Plan; regenerating an area that was destined to be a bus depot.
Sandra O’Connell, Shelley McNamara, Yvonne Farrell and Paul McClean.
From these beginnings, their expanding creative team built schools, universities and arts centres across Ireland, and went on to win prestigious international design competitions, such as for 1,000 offices at Italy’s most renowned School of Economics, the Luigi Bocconi University in Milan or the competition for a 35,000m2 engineering university in Lima, Peru. Closer to their Dublin studio, they designed the handsome, Ballinasloe-limestone clad Department of Finance on Merrion Row and, in partnership with OMP, the ESB headquarters on Fitzwilliam Street Lower, made from over 1,000 handcrafted bricks.
Their two-part presentation was deeply memorable, immersing attendees in their design philosophy and describing how the DNA of their adopted city has influenced their work taround the world. See details of Design Week Dublin, in partnership with Range Rover, at www.designweekdublin.com.
Click into the gallery to see the guests who attended.
Photographer: Conor Healy, Picture It Pix; @pictureitpix
