Grafton Architects – Venice 2012

Grafton Architects from Dublin, Ireland, received the Silver Lion award at this year’s Venice architecture Biennale, for their impressive presentation of the project for a university campus in Lima, Peru. The Silver Lion is awarded to emerging architects who raise expectations, and it is the first time a practice from Ireland won this prestigious award.

Presenting their architecture as a “new geography”, the Dublin-based office uses this exhibition to explore characteristic historical examples of architecture merging with the landscape, as well as the work of Brazilian architect Paolo Mendes da Rocha, in order to better approach their first project in South America – a university campus in Lima, Peru.

The director of this year’s Biennale, David Chipperfield, who chose the topic “Common Ground”, placed the Grafton Architects exhibition as central in the main Giardini pavilion. The jury president, Dutch architect Wiel Arets,  said that this exhibition showcases on various levels the conceptual and spatial qualities and potentials of the way Grafton Architects explore and present the urban landscape.

In one part of the exhibition Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell, founders of Grafton Architects, explore the surprising similarities between the Skellig Michael convent in Ireland and the Peruvian city of Machu Picchu. Despite the fact that these two places are separated by a huge physical distance and were created in disparate times, there is a common line that connects them. In both examples the intimate man-made spaces are in perfect harmony with their impressive natural surrounding and, as expressed by the exhibition authors, they tell the same tale.

The exhibition topic is transfered from the past into the present day, and the comparison of distant (yet very near) worlds is repeated in the second part, through the dialogue McNamara and Farrell started with the Brazilian architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha for the purpose of this Biennale.

Grafton Architects recently won a competition for a university campus in Lima, Peru, when they realized that the analysis of da Rocha’s works will improve their knowledge of building tradition and the cultural context of the local site and climate. The analysis features the Serra Duorada stadium designed by the Pritzker Award winner da Rocha in 1973. Using da Rocha’s idea of architecture as a “new geography” and the idea of the university as a “knowledge arena”, Grafton Architects manage to transform infrastructure into an urban landscape. By not treating the architecture as an isolated building, they show a new quality of the inevitable transformations of urban landscape – its complete remodeling.

Probably the biggest importance of this exhibition is the fact that it unequivocally demonstrates how openness to influences is the beginning and pre-requisite to quality architecture. In this sense, Grafton Architects present an excellent answer to the Biennale topic “Common Ground”.

Photo: Miloš Mirosavić