Grafton Architects
Teachers at the School of Architecture at University College Dublin from 1976 to 2002 and appointed adjunct Professors in 2015, they have been visiting professors at EPFL, Lausanne 2010 - 2011, and at Accademia di Archittettura, Mendrisio, Switzerland, 2008 - 2010, where they were appointed as full professors in 2013.
They held the Kenzo Tange chair at GSD Harvard in 2010 and the Louis Kahn chair at Yale in the fall of 2011. They are founder members of Group 91, the architects’ collaborative responsible for the urban re-generation of Dublin’s cultural quarter of Temple Bar.
Grafton Architects were invited to show in the Italian Pavilion, as part of the Venice Biennale ‘Next’ in 2002; they exhibited in the Irish group exhibition ‘The Lives of Spaces’, at the Venice Biennale 2010; they won the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Biennale Common Ground exhibition 2012; and presented ‘the Physics of Culture’ at the 2016 Venice Biennale entitled ‘Reporting from the Front’ and curated by Alejandro Aravena. The practice has been shortlisted for numerous international competitions including: The New Mackintosh School of Art, Glasgow, United Kingdom, 2009; The London School of Economics, London, United Kingdom, 2013; Dublin City Library Parnell Square, Dublin, Ireland, 2014 (together with Shaffrey Associates); and the new headquarters for the Electricity Supply Board in Dublin, Ireland, in 2010, which they won with OMP Architects.
Grafton Architects were winners of the World Building of the Year Award in 2008 for the Bocconi University project in Milan. The Bocconi project was one of the five finalists for the Mies Van Der Rohe Prize 2009 and in the Building for Brussels Exhibition 2010. The Department of Finance building in Dublin’s historic centre won the British Civic Trust award in 2009 together with the AAI Special Award 2009. The Graduate Medical School and Student Accommodation, at the University of Limerick, was shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize 2013 and won both an Architectural Association of Ireland & the Royal Institute of Architects Ireland award. The recently completed university building for UTEC – Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología in Lima, Peru, has been nominated for the RIBA International Prize and the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize as well as receiving awards from the Architectural Association of Ireland & the Royal Institute of Architects Ireland.
Current projects include The School of Economics for the University of Toulouse 1 Capitol, Toulouse, France, now under construction; Institut Mines Telecom University Building, Paris Saclay, France; the new Town House Building, Kingston University London, United Kingdom; Parnell Cultural Quarter – Dublin City Library, Ireland; the Paul Marshall Building, London School of Economics, United Kingdom; all won by international competition.
Grafton Architects were one of six practices chosen by the Royal Academy in London to exhibit in the “Sensing Spaces” Exhibition 2014, and were invited by the Miralles Foundation to create a Pavilion for the 2014 Tercentenary of the City of Barcelona, centred on the idea of memory. As part of ‘Irish Design 2015’ Grafton Architects were invited to make an installation at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, where they collaborated with Graphic Relief to create ‘the Ogham Wall’, a series of 23 concrete fins arranged in clusters within the V&A’s Tapestry Gallery. In 2016 Grafton Architects exhibited work in the architecture room at the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition in London.
Grafton Architects lecture widely in Europe and in the US. They have been external examiners at Schools of Architecture in the UK and in Ireland including Oxford Brookes, Cambridge, Kingston, London Metropolitan School of Architecture and University College Dublin.