Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects to Head Venice Architecture Biennale 2018
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Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of Dublin-based firm Grafton Architects, have been appointed the curators of the upcoming Architecture Biennale in Venice, which will take place from May to November 2018.The duo follows Chilean architect and 201
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara of Grafton Architects to Head Venice Architecture Biennale 2018
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara, founders of Dublin-based firm Grafton Architects, have been appointed the curators of the upcoming Architecture Biennale in Venice, which will take place from May to November 2018.The duo follows Chilean architect and 2016 Pritzker Laureate Alejandro Aravenna whose critically acclaimed “Reporting from the Front” drew more than 260,000 visitors to Venice last year, establishing a new record.“The Exhibition curated by Alejandro Aravena offered visitors a critical overview of the worldwide evolution of architecture and underlined how important it is that a qualified demand on the part of individuals and communities be met by an equally effective response, thereby confirming that architecture is one of civil society’s instruments for organizing the space in which it lives and works,” Biennale President Paolo Baratta said in a statement. “Along these lines, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara will continue to address the same theme but from the point of view of the quality of the public and private space, of urban space, of the territory and of the landscape as the main ends of architecture,” he continued.Grafton Architects are no strangers to Venice. In 2012 they won the Silver Lion for their work on the then still uncompleted UTEC University campus in Lima, Peru, (together with the work of Paulo Mendes da Rocha), which was awarded the Royal Institute of British Architect’s inaugural International Prize for the world’s best building last November. In 2016, the firm was also represented at the Architecture Biennale in Venice with “The Physics of Culture”.Both architects graduated from the School of Architecture of University College in Dublin, where they founded their firm in 1978. Many of their prolific projects were realized in their home country, among them the Parson’s Building at Trinity College in Dublin and the Government Department of Finance for the Office of Public Works in Dublin. International projects include a new building for the Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy, which won the World Building of the Year Award in 2008, and the above mentioned UTEC University campus in Lima, among many others. The firm was also recently selected to design a new faculty building for the London School of Economics and Political Science in London.Both women have been teaching at the University College of Dublin since 1976, and are currently full Professors of architecture at the Accademia di Mendrisio and Adjunct Professors in UCD; they held the Louis Kahn Chair at Yale in 2011, and Kenzo Tange Chair at GSD Harvard in 2010 and were jury members for numerous prestigious architectural awards such as the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2008, the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 2011 and the RIBA Award in 2012.In 2015 Farrell and McNamara won the Jane Drew Prize for their achievements as women in architecture, following Kathryn Findlay, Eva Jiricná, and Zaha Hadid. After Japanese architect Kazuyo Seijma (SANAA), who directed the Architecture Biennale in 2010, the upcoming edition will now be the second in the exhibition’s history to be helmed by women.The 16th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia runs from May 26 to November 25, 2018. Read more
