Yvonne Farrell (Tullamore, Ireland, 1951) and Shelley McNamara (Lisdoonvarna, Ireland, 1952) began marching slowly but surely toward global success in 1978, when they established their firm Grafton Architects in Dublin. International fame came in the late 2000s but it was definitely worth the wait. 

The extension of the Bocconi University in Milan (2008) is an architectural masterpiece resulting from the dialogue between a forward-looking client, a top-tier competition jury chaired by Kenneth Frampton, and Grafton’s ground-breaking project for a suspended architecture/infrastructure, emphatic yet carefully contextualised, allowing the campus and the city’s public domain to merge visually and spatially. 

Imbued with kaleidoscopic references ranging from brutalism to early modern avant-gardes, the Bocconi was the watershed that led to a series of successful designs for teaching institutions, all sharing the same momentum towards spatial generosity, and peaking with the dramatic “man-made cliffs” of the Lima UTEC campus (2015). At changing scales and responding to different commissions, such projects as the Solstice Arts Centre in Navan, Ireland (2008), the office building for the Department of Finance offices in Dublin (2009) and the president’s house at the University of Limerick (2006–2010) add to the clarification of Grafton’s main preoccupation: through the last four decades, they have been searching for “freespace” in architecture. 

“Freespace” was the title of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Farrell and McNamara. As the architecture critic Rowan Moore noted in The Guardian(29 April, 2018), in addition to their ongoing commitment to teaching – they are both full professors at the Accademia di Architettura in Mendrisio, Switzerland – Farrell and McNamara remain “well-respected architects who, determinedly, consistently and over a long period of time, do their stuff”, always searching for the “spatial gifts that architecture can offer,” as they themselves describe their quest.