GRAFTON ARCHITECTS
GRAFTON ARCHITECTS
GRAFTON ARCHITECTS
Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara co-founded Grafton Architects in 1978 having graduated from University College Dublin in 1974. They are Fellows of the RIAI, International Honorary Fellows of the RIBA and elected members of Aosdána, the eminent Irish Art organisation. Teaching at the School of Architecture at University College Dublin from 1976 to 2002, they were appointed Adjunct Professors at UCD in 2015. They have been Visiting Professors at EPFL, Lausanne from 2010 – 2011. They held the Kenzo Tange Chair at GSD Harvard in 2010 and the Louis Kahn chair at Yale in the Autumn of 2011. Currently, they are Professors at the Accademia di Archittettura, Mendrisio,Switzerland.
In 2018, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara were the Curators of the Venice Architecture Biennale.
The company directors of Grafton Architects Limited are Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara (founding directors), Gerard Carty and Philippe O’Sullivan. Gerard and Philippe have been with the practice since 1992, are accomplished teachers and architects and play a central role in the life of the practice.
The ethos and culture of Grafton Architects is that every member of the practice is highly valued in the making of meaningful work.
In 2022, Simona Castelli, Matt McCullagh and Kieran O’Brien were appointed as Directors of the Practice and Donal O’Herlihy, James Rossa O’Hare, David Healy, Joanne Lyons, Ivan O’Connell, Fiona Hughes, Anne Henry, Steven Connolly were appointed as Associate Directors of the Practice.
Grafton Architects have participated in numerous exhibitions including : the Sensing Spaces Exhibition in 2014 in the Royal Academy in London; a Pavilion for the 2014 Tercentenary of the City of Barcelona; ‘the Ogham Wall’ installation in 2015 in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
The practice has won numerous awards for their work. In 2016, Grafton Architects were honoured by being awarded the inaugural RIBA International Prize for the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC) in Lima, Peru. It has recently been announced that they have won the 2020 RIBA Royal Gold Medal.Shelley and Yvonne have been selected as the 2020 Pritzker Prize Laureates, the award that is known internationally as architecture’s highest honour.
The 2021 RIBA Stirling Prize was awarded to Kingston University London.
The Daylight Award, which honours and supports daylight research and daylight in architecture was awarded to Grafton Architects in 2022. The European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award was awarded to Kingston University London in 2022.
Director Gerard Carty
Director, Gerard Carty is Fellow of the RIAI, and has been with the practice for over 30 years, contributing to the ideas, ethos and management of the practice during this period. He qualified in 1987 with a diploma from DIT Dublin, and a degree from University of Dublin, Trinity College. He has been involved in architectural education since 1993, as both teacher and invited critic, to architecture schools in Ireland, and abroad. He currently an associate Professor at SAUL, the School of Architecture, University of Limerick, located in the south west of Ireland.
