a+u Architecture and Urbanism 22:09_624

a+u’s September issue features Grafton Architects, founded in 1978 by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. Rooted in their home city of Dublin, where topography, street life, literature, language, and people are deeply interconnected, the work of Grafton appears “drawn out of something subterranean… richly layered as physical constructs and as cultural interventions,” as described by literary critic Finton O’Toole in his commentary. These qualities allow Grafton’s architecture to “coexist in different temporalities.” Since winning the competition for Luigi Bocconi University’s new faculty office and auditorium facility in 2002, Grafton has proven to be as adept in internalizing and enhancing the streetscape of Georgian Dublin, as that of Lima, Milan, or Toulouse, through a series of large-scale public buildings. While there is an unmistakable tectonic power to Grafton’s approach to form,…

FREESPACE describes a generosity of spirit and a sense of humanity at the core of architecture’s agenda, focusing on the quality of space itself. FREESPACE focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it, and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers. FREESPACE celebrates architecture’s capacity to find additional and unexpected generosity in each project – even within the most private, defensive, exclusive, or commercially restricted conditions. FREESPACE provides the opportunity to emphasize nature’s free gifts of light – sunlight and moonlight, air, gravity, materials – natural and human-made resources. FREESPACE encourages reviewing ways of thinking, new ways of seeing the world, of inventing solutions where architecture provides for the well-being and dignity of each citizen of this fragile planet. FREESPACE can be a space…

Toulouse has a breach in its historic city wall that provides an opportunity to see boundaries not as limits, but as thresholds to be crossed and retained. Positioned on this key site, at the break in the wall, where the canal turns at the junction with the Garonne River, the new Toulouse School of Economics (TSE) occupies a pivotal location, for both the university and the city. Elements of Toulouse For us, Toulouse is a city of bridges, quay walls, city walls, ramps, promenades, brick buttresses, brick and stone towers, mysterious cool interiors and cloisters, and archways and courtyards. The vast space of the meandering Garonne provides the wide horizon, the sense of connection with the landscape beyond. The linear, human-made, tree-lined canal cuts through the city and sets up framed, axial,…

In 2011, Grafton Architects and O’Mahony Pike Architects’ joint design for a new headquarters for the ESB, the electricity supplier for Ireland, received first prize in an international competition. Sited since 1927 on Fitzwilliam Street Lower in the first block to the south of Merrion Square in Dublin, the ESB wanted to remain on its prominent Georgian streetscape. Within a mixture of protected 18th-century buildings and a collection of 20th-century additions, the ESB occupied an entire city block. The design involves a site-responsive set of buildings along Fitzwilliam Street Lower that engage the typical Georgian characteristics, with the intention to reinstate the unconscious rhythm of the Georgian street that had been lost in the 1960s. A walkway route through the center of the site from Fitzwilliam Street Lower to James Street…

The greatest products of architecture are not so much individual as they are social works; rather the children of nations in labor than the inspired efforts of men of genius; the legacy of a race; the accumulated wealth of centuries, the residuum of the successive evaporations of human society – in short, a species of formation. –Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris Change is constant in cities, almost their defining characteristic. No city is ever finished: adjustments and additions, revisions and extensions are forever being made. In the great metropolises of London, New York, Shanghai, the crane, the hoarding, the scaffold are every bit as ubiquitous as the grand monuments and the fixed lineaments of streets and squares. In provincial cities, the work of building up, building out, and building on is as…

The vision for Dublin City Library: a meeting place for people and ideas, a place for people to learn, create, and participate, a home for contemporary library collections and spaces for reading, listening, watching, playing, researching, or thinking. The brief outlined 11,500 m2 of library space, including an auditorium, music hub, education center, intercultural center, and retail areas. In any era of civilization, a library is a gift to citizens that demonstrates belief in the future. To make a 21st-century city library is to make an imagination hub, a place for the democratic gathering and creative life of a community. Dublin City Library, set beside the existing Hugh Lane Gallery, lives at the heart of the dynamic Parnell Square Cultural Quarter. The gallery is acknowledged as one of the most significant city…