Pritzker Architecture Prize 2020 winner announced

Yvonne Farrell and Shelly McNamara have won what’s known internationally as architecture’s highest honour, the Pritzker Prize. The pair from Dublin, Ireland, are the country’s first winners, and are only the fourth and fifth women to be chosen as Pritzker Prize Laureates since the award’s inception in 1979.

Thomas Pritzker, Hyatt Foundation Chairman, announced the winners in Chicago yesterday.

The Pritzker Prize was established by the late Jay A. Pritzker and his wife, Cindy. The annually-awarded honour recognises architects whose built work demonstrates talent, vision, and commitment, and that has produced significant contributions to humanity and the environment through the art of architecture.

“Architecture could be described as one of the most complex and important cultural activities on the planet,” Farrell said. “To be an architect is an enormous privilege. To win this prize is a wonderful endorsement of our belief in architecture.”

The jury’s citation described the pair as embodying an “unceasing commitment to excellence in architecture,” and commended their “integrity in their approach to both their buildings, as well as the way they conduct their practice, their belief in collaboration, [and] their generosity towards their colleagues.”

“Within the ethos of a practice such as ours, we have so often struggled to find space for the implementation of such values as humanism, craft, generosity, and cultural connection with each place and context within which we work,” McNamara said. “It is therefore extremely gratifying that this recognition is bestowed upon us and our practice and upon the body of work we have managed to produce over a long number of years.”

Farrell echoed those sentiments, explaining “the core of our practice is a real belief that architecture matters. It is a cultural spatial phenomenon that people invent.” 

“They have tried, with considerable success, to help us all overcome what is likely to evermore become a serious human problem,” explained Justice Stephen Breyer, Jury Chair. “Namely, how do we build housing and workplaces in a world with over half of its population dwelling in urban environments, and many of them who cannot afford luxury?” 

Farrell and McNamara co-founded their firm, Grafton Architects, in 1978, and began building their reputation throughout the country. It was only in 2003, when the pair won an international competition to design the school of economics at Bocconi University in Milan, that Grafton took on projects outside of Ireland and became well known to the wider architectural world.

The Bocconi University building garnered fanfare around the globe, and won World Building of the Year in 2008 at the World Architecture Festival.

In the time since, Grafton has gone on to design more educational buildings, including The London School of Economics and University College Dublin. Their design footprint today extends across the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Peru, as well as their native Ireland.

^{Top banner image: Universita Luigi Bocconi, photo courtesy of Federico Brunetti.}