Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara become the 47th and 48th Laureates of the Pritzker Prize and the first from Ireland. As young architecture graduates from University College Dublin they established Grafton Architects in 1978 in Dublin and together built up an impressive oeuvre of over forty years that the Pritzker jury recognizes as a consistent service to humanity as evidenced through a body of built work.
The Jury appreciates the Laureates “For their integrity in their approach to both their buildings, as well as the way they conduct their practice, their belief in collaboration, their generosity towards their colleagues, especially as evidenced in such events as the 2018 Venice Biennale, their unceasing commitment to excellence in architecture, their responsible attitude toward the environment, their ability to be cosmopolitan while embracing the uniqueness of each place in which they work, for all these reasons and more, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara are awarded the 2020 Pritzker Architecture Prize.”
Shelley McNamara explains: “Within the ethos of a practice such as ours, we have so often struggled to find space for the implementation of such values as humanism, craft, generosity, and cultural connection with each place and context within which we work. It is therefore extremely gratifying that this recognition is bestowed upon us and our practice and upon the body of work we have managed to produce over a long number of years. It is also a wonderful recognition of the ambition and vision of the clients who commissioned us and enabled us to bring our buildings to fruition.”
The architects combine a unique mastery of human scale proportions with a conscious dialogue between internal and external. Their native Ireland informs an acute sensitivity to geography, changing climates and nature in each of their building locations. With their work they challenge the question of how to build in a world with over half of its population living in urban conditions of whom many cannot afford luxury.
Shelley McNamara illustrates: “Architecture is a framework for human life. It anchors us and connects us to the world in a way which possibly no other space-making discipline can.” Farrell continues, “At the core of our practice is a real belief that architecture matters. It is a cultural spatial phenomenon that people invent.”
