The Board of La Biennale di Venezia, chaired by Paolo Baratta, has met on January 16th 2017 and appointed Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara (Grafton Architects) as curators of the 16th International Architecture Exhibition, will be inaugurated on Saturday, May 26 and will conclude on Sunday, November 25, 2018.
On the occasion of this decision, President Paolo Baratta declared: “The Exhibition curated by Alejandro Aravena offered visitors a critical overview of the worldwide evolution of architecture and underlined how important it is that a qualified demand on the part of individuals and communities be met by an equally effective response, thereby confirming that architecture is one of civil society’s instruments for organizing the space in which it lives and works.
Along these lines, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara will continue to address the same theme but from the point of view of the quality of the public and private space, of urban space, of the territory and of the landscape as the main ends of architecture. The curators, who are well-known for the refinement of their work, are also known for their intense didactic activity and their ability to involve and fascinate new generations.”
Famous for working as a team, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara live and work in Dublin. The firm were represented at the Biennale Architettura 2002; won the Silver Lion at the Biennale Architettura in 2012, where they presented their Project for the UTEC University campus in Lima, Peru, together with the work of Paula Mendes da Rocha; they were represented at the Biennale Architettura 2016 under the title “The Physics of Culture”.
Farrell and McNamara have designed and built several schools and architectural works for institutions and universities, mostly in Ireland, including a new building for the Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy. The architects have been jury members for many prestigious architectural awards such as the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2008, the Mies Van Der Rohe Prize in 2011 and the RIBA Award in 2012. Source by La Biennale.