Farrell and McNamara established Grafton Architects in 1978. They have held the Kenzo Tange Chair at Harvard GSD and the Louis Kahn Chair at Yale University. The pair has also been invited as visiting teachers at EPFL in Lausanne and the Accademia d’Archittettura, in Mendrisio, where they were appointed as teachers in 2013, in addition to visiting several other universities worldwide for lectures and crits.
From the architect. In the project we started, facing the current situation – an old warehouse, part of Tel Aviv port complex of restored warehouses (from the Tel Aviv Bauhaus period). The task was to design a showroom of four different kitchen types for two kitchen companies, Le Cornue and SieMatic.
We decided to use the existing cross plan, thus carrying out the idea of four sleeves – four show spaces, each with its very distinguished and articulated character, offering different experience, while part of an organism that functions and breathes with all its parts as one.
The building was ripped off, the four spaces were cleaned of all that is unnecessary, left naked on their construction, this way exposing the authentic materials – bricks, metal and concrete structure of the building.
The four show spaces were knitted together by the overall rough background and the installation ducts passing through it – the electricity and air conditioning, placed in black ducts, while the brass light lines extended like golden threads. The electric installation ducts are exposed and stretched, in order to emphasize the linearity and the horizontality of the space and interconnect everything altogether, being like life veins of the organism, supplying the necessity to each space.
Materials were chosen to make the linkage and to give the desired atmosphere in a performance. On one hand there is the background that is with the authentic bricks, metal and concrete, on the other hand – the repeating brass theme across the building, seen in the library, the delicate light long threads, the decorative lamps over the working area, as well as the elements in the “Le Cornue” part.
The “Le Cornue” kitchens with their particular design like old vintage suitcases gave us a platform to play with materials and forms, turning the space into a scene, giving to it a specific atmosphere. All La Cornue appliances, placed individually, present its real character and pop out like jewels, thanks to the contrast between the luxury metals and the rough background. We added the pot hanger that added character as well as the mirror doors that multiply space and materials, and create illusion.
Left from the entrance, the “Pure Black” SieMatic island has its video art wall as a modern way to experience the kitchen space. In the front the “Urban” kitchen is treated as a loft which also enables the salesmen to use the space as a working place for them. The fourth kitchen type is the “Classic White” kitchen.
When we think “contemporary houses”, our minds automatically go to a number of features. For example, we start to picture clean white surfaces and colour schemes, bright pops of accent colour, unconventional decor shapes, and lots of crystal clear glass. If that sounds like the kind of contemporary house you enjoy most too, then you simply must check out the photos of Turned House in Treviso, Italy! Turned House is..
“When you read Love in the Time of Cholera you come to realize the magic realism of South America.” Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara and I were nestled in a corner of the Barbican Centre’s sprawling, shallow atrium talking about the subject of their most recent accolade, the Royal Institute of British Architects inaugural International Prize, awarded that previous evening. That same night the two Irish architects, who founded their practice in Dublin in the 1970s, also delivered a lecture on the Universidad de Ingeniería and Tecnologia (UTEC)—their “modern-day Machu Picchu” in Lima—to a packed audience in London’s Portland Place.
While this project firmly angled a spotlight on their work, they were today revealed as directors of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale – the most important architectural event on the cultural calendar.
Farrell and McNamara, who together lead a team of twenty-five as Grafton Architects, are both powerful thinkers, considered conversationalists and unobtrusively groundbreaking designers. For a practice so compact their international portfolio is exceptionally broad. The first phase of the UTEC in the Peruvian capital, which began following an international competition in 2011, represents the farthest territory the practice have geographically occupied. It is, in their words, a “man-made cliff” between the Pacific and the mountains – on one side a cascading garden, and on the other a “shoulder” to the city cast from bare concrete.
The scale and character of the UTEC belie a rich portfolio of smaller projects, which began in the mid-1990s. A specialism in higher education buildings has evolved out of successive competitions, culminating (prior to UTEC) in Milan’s Universita Luigi Bocconi (2008). Burrowed into a small site along one of the city’s wide, tall streets, the monumental twenty-two-meter cantilever of the building appears to defy gravity – or, in their words, exists “in dialogue with gravity.” The spatial control required to achieve this structural feat was, for Farrell, a simple matter of “positing the two main beams on the roof, and then hanging the offices so they could be like soffits, adjusted.” Stood in the marble-lined, brightly lit ante-space, one is acutely aware of the weight suspended above.
Ireland, where Shelley and McNamara were both born and educated, and from where they now teach and practice, has been crucial to the development of their temperament as architects. The country is defined on the one hand by geological, primal coasts and landscapes and, on the other, elemental vernacular structures. “The places that you love do seep into your unconscious,” McNamara says. “And they have probably also seeped into our way of thinking. We found at a certain moment that in order to find a way of discussing our own work to ourselves—to be liberated from just the plan, section and elevation—required a different sort of language. We would ask: is it a cliff? Is it something floating, like a cloud?” These sorts of terms have partially transposed Grafton’s practice from the confines of their own discipline into another area of thought.
“At the same time,” Farrell argues, “there is also a fantastic heritage of town, sprawl, and street in Ireland. When I was a child I was part of a town structure but I could always run out and into the fields – there exists this duality between urban and rural.” “Ruined monasteries, tower houses, and fragments standing in the landscape are all incredibly strong,” McNamara suggests. And there is certainly a particular sort of elementalism to these images, particularly where the west coast of the country faces the uninterrupted expanse of the Atlantic. “We’re aware of sky and we’re aware of wind; we’re on an island in which things are constantly changing,” Farrell states. “We are very conscious of weather and, therefore, outside and inside change.”
“We often say that James Joyce,” the great Irish poet and novelist, “held Dublin in the words of a book,” Farrell recalls. “In a similar way I think that we also imagine verbally, and then make.” Projects become more than just a story or a narrative – they become an inhabited physical reality. “When you read Thomas Hardy, for example, you realise that he was an architect. Literature, words, imagination and making are all very deeply connected.”
This approach to architecture has, in recent decades, become more and more a part of how Irish architecture is perceived around the world. “It’s a value system,” Farrell believes. “Irish architects are very well trained. Shelley and I have taught in many architecture schools around the world but the thing about Irish schools of architecture is that students have their feet on the ground, but their eyes on the stars.” This culture developed through the generosity of heads of schools, McNamara recalls. “They gave young architects teaching jobs which meant, for instance, that Yvonne and I were working as teachers only one year out of college. It means that we now have twenty-five years of conversation with people about their work, and our work.”
For a practice born in such an intimate context, Grafton have emerged as highly international. Alongside their creative leadership of the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, they are currently working on the London School of Economics’ Paul Marshall Building in London, the Institut Mines Telecom in Paris, the University of Economics in Toulouse, and a new city library for Dublin. “This sort of global practice,” Farrell explains, “can be about learning from new places; being mobile enough to go and understand them. Or it can be about cultural imperialism and homogenisation. Earlier I was reading about what was supposedly the first university in the world, with primarily Chinese and Indian scholars. It was about nothing more than the exchange of culture and ideas – and certainly not about one taking over the other. So ‘globalised’ practice is not about conquering something, or asserting your presence someplace – it’s about contributing to something that you find is good.”
From the architect. Aim of the architectural intervention of Jardin de l’Ange is the requalification of a square that, for its own nature and position has always been the crucial and strategic hub for the community life.
The main goal is to improve and consolidate the fruition of the square, thought as an amphitheatre with permanent bleachers covered by the typical local stones, created in order to mark (delimit) the public space defining the pedestrian access.
The Jardin de l’Ange, if during the day is an interaction point and an open air living room, by the nights, due to its new conformation becomes an interactive social area.
The chalet façade, included as well in the intervention, has been elaborated with a technological wall provided by mechanized LED walls that, when needed, reveal a convertible stage, always different in size and shape, adaptable to any kind of event. Sideways now there’s an innovated technical covering, a white multifaceted texture that, playing with lights and shadows gives a new alternative imagine to the front building.
The project also includes a total white covering composed by a metallic structure with circular section elements, variable in length and diameter. This metallic twist, completely visible in the winter season, during the summer months will be upholster with tie rods and a white technical plastic fabric, which allows the shade in the hottest hours, lighting effects during the summer nights and protection from frequent rains.
The lines that mark the profile of the covering are an explicit reference to the Mont Blanc skyline and its peaks raising behind the chalet. They recall the grandeur and majesty of the majestic “Giant”.
From Office to Creative Atelier The independent branding agency Identity Works is housed in one of Stockholms most iconic commercial buildings from the Swedish Grace era, designed by Cyrillus Johansson. When expanding within the building Elding Oscarson were given the opportunity to thoroughly look into the agency’s workflow in relation to the disposition of spaces. Within a tight framework of standard requirements, a project tailored for the client regarding openness, transparency, communication, and creative flow, could be crafted.
The envisioned creative atelier, however with the need of many enclosed rooms, resulted in a layout where enclosed spaces are arranged to form a series of interconnected open spaces. Like buildings, towards a square, these volumes have been given facades with large windows providing light and transparency. Their contrasting cladding of clear lacquered MDF shelving, highlights the spatial organization while functioning as an ever-changing mood board.
The aim of the design is making a house using all familiar local materials and nomal building methods, so the design can speak itself with minimum care for artificial lighting and material use.
The house is a 45degree diagonal block, divided the 18mx20m site into 2 triangle gardens. From here, all the views inside the house and toward gardens are framed in various ways – from the combination of basic elements: white brick walls, wooden beams, openings and the roof.
In order to make the building appear lower, the original three-layer buildings look like only two layers high, which helps create intimate visual experience for children and reduce the pressure of the volume.
Axon
This design paid full attention to the creature of public space. An 8-meter-wide north-south corridor runs through the building is an inner street-style pathway inside of the building, which provides two-story high public communication space for children.
Through linking teaching space with 25-meter distance in the west and serving space with lower requirements in the east, ‘the inner street’ makes the building a whole part. This layout, both conducive to the partition, the function does not interfere with each other, but also to streamline the shortest, each part of the users can easily reach the mostly used regions.
Due to the highway in the east and north side, the design minimized windows in the east and north facade in order to create a quiet environment. To increase th lighting, the architect inserted a variety of large and small courtyard in-between rooms, which constitute interactive small communities for teachers and students together.
‘Bonochhaya’ is an exclusive housing project themed around the heritage of Shantiniketan, which as a place, is a tribute to the legacy of Rabindranath Tagore. It is a project for a luxury retreat with a rural, nature-inspired flavour.
Built as the client Interaction zone for ‘Bonochhaya’, the experience centre for this development is designed to bring out all these aspects and more. It consists all essential functions of meeting spaces, presentation areas, discussion zones, set in the environment showcasing the local flavour as a unique selling feature of the project.
Nature, romanticised through the emphasis on sitting in the shade of trees, is an integral part of the design and is woven in through its conceptualisation. The glass waiting lounge overlooking the open-to-sky deck invites one from the street to taste the environment created through these green connections.
With temperatures soaring upto 45°C, it was imperative that the design keeps out the harsh summer sun. Double brick walls and Southward-tilted terracotta tile roofs were ideal passive cooling measures to employ as they also lent an earthy vibe. The sloping roofs were split into 3 different heights to work as an interesting way to bring greens in to the various volumes. The shaded northern green courtyard capitalised on existing trees and translated into the ‘Soul’ of Shantiniketan life.
Inspired by Tagore’s teachings, tribal art, intrinsic to Shantiniketan, was woven into the design and graphics. Brick walls and Terracotta Tiles complement the Steel Structure and Concrete floors to bring out the contemporary and forward-thinking nature of the true Tagore disciple.
Once the development is fully occupied, the experience centre is planned for re-use as a doctor’s clinic for the local community. The facility would include a day care ward, a small diagnostic centre and an out-patient department. This is something the developer had planned at the start of the project as a means to give back to the community. We managed to integrate the social aspect with their requirement of a space for marketing into a single structure, saving cost and time while adding sentimental and architectural value to both functions.
This 5-acre site is bound to the Roaring Fork River and sits within a riparian habitat flanked by pastoral grasslands. The low-profile residence deflects in plan, responding to the river’s edge.
The architectural form defines several exterior courtyards, gardens, terraces and walkways. The interior space is divided into two wings containing a Master Suite on one side and guest bedrooms on the opposite, with the open plan kitchen and living spaces connecting the wings.
Product Description: The exterior cementitious panels were provided by Cement Board Fabricators and were their ‘Cembonit’ series. The individual panels were designed to align with the window+door glazing patterns/openings and consisted of 3 colors that reflected the natural grasses on the property and responded to the seasonal coloration change.
Those colors included: pearl, desert and ash. These panels varied in width and height and are 5/16” thick. They were fabricated and edged in the factory and shipped to the project after extensive shop-drawing review+approval. They were instrumental to the exterior of the project in situating the house naturally within the site and require no maintenance.
Sig Nordal 