The Irish architect Shelley McNamara, founder of Grafton Architects studio along with Ivonne Farrell, will take part in the program “building, living, thinking” of Cersaie 2016 with the conference An Arena for Learning: Grafton Architects, scheduled for Thursday, September 29 at 17 o’clock at the Architecture Gallery.
During a dialogue with Fulvio Irace, professor of History of Architecture of the Milan Polytechnic, Shelley McNamara will deal with the issue of education: in an increasingly complex world, how the architecture of universities and places of higher education can enhance the education of young people? How to encourage the circulation of ideas and increase the confrontation between disciplines?
Shelley McNamara and Ivonne Farrell, members of Grafton Architects studio based in Dublin, have indeed addressed the educational issue with various projects, having built structures for many universities such as the Faculty of Economics of the University of Toulouse, the Bocconi in Milan or the UTEC campus in Lima, defined by them "an arena for learning."
At Cersaie, during the meeting, Shelley McNamara will not only outline the projects carried out together with her colleague Ivonne Farrell, but she will try to explain what are their architectural view and the understanding on the subject.
The Grafton Architects studio was founded in 1978. Besides managing the studio, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara taught at the School of Architecture of the University of Dublin from 1976 to 2002. Currently, they are visiting Professor of the Architecture Academy of Mendrisio and had prominent roles at Harvard and Yale University. Their projects have been exhibited at the MoMA (New York) and this year they are going to participate in the Venice Architecture Biennale with the project on the University of Lima. Recently, they have been selected for the design of a new building of the London School of Economics and Political Science in London.
