The Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal is the oldest architectural award in the world: it has existed since 1848, and its laureates are personally approved by the monarch, starting with Queen Victoria. In recent decades, the lists of its winners have largely duplicated the Pritzker Prize, Praemium Imperiale and similar awards, however, the Gold Medal is still distinguished by an emphasis on the British Isles - including historians, theorists - or practitioners whose best works appeared long ago, but are appreciated only now. like Neve Brown (2017).
Grafton was founded in 1978 in Dublin by Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, but back in 2012 at the Venice Biennale they
received the "Silver Lion" as "promising" architects - for participating in the main exhibition. Then they showed their project of a university building in the Peruvian capital Lima, which in 2016 became the first building to be awarded the newly created RIBA International Prize. Obviously, they were recognized as "mature" - and soon they themselves became curators of the 16th Venice Biennale. Their track record also includes a commercial distinction: their Luigi Bocconi University in Milan became the first winner of the Grand Prix at the World Festival of Architecture, then held in Barcelona (2008). Grafton's work has featured in the final of the Mies van der Rohe and Sterling awards.
McNamara and Farrell not only do a lot and successfully design university buildings, but also actively teach, in addition, many representatives of the bright and interesting Irish school of architecture have passed through their bureau. Therefore, their reputation among colleagues and compatriots is very high: their projects are always energetic, large-scale, material - and take into account human needs, including psychological ones.
The name of the workshop comes from Grafton Street in Dublin: the city influenced their work, and they were among eight young bureaus, the Group'91, which revitalized Dublin's historic Temple Bar district in the 1990s.
The architects, in response to the news of the RIBA award, emphasized that it also belongs to all of their current and former employees, customers and contractors. According to McNamara and Farrell, for them “architecture is an optimistic profession, with the ability to anticipate future realities. It has the greatest cultural significance because it is the shell for human life. Architecture translates human needs and dreams into the form of a building, into the silent language of space."
