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“When you read Love in the Time of Cholera you come to realize the magic realism of South America.” Yvonne Farrell, Shelley McNamara and I were in a corner of the Barbican Centre’s sprawling, shallow atrium talking about the subject of their most recent accolade, the Royal Institute of British Architects inaugural International Prize, awarded that previous evening. That same night the two Irish architects, who founded their practice in Dublin in the 1970s, also delivered a lecture on the Universidad de Ingeniería and Tecnologia (UTEC)—their “modern-day Machu Picchu” in Lima—to a packed audience in London’s Portland Place.
Farrell and McNamara, who together lead a team of twenty-five as Grafton Architects, are both powerful thinkers, considered conversationalists and unobtrusively groundbreaking designers. For a practice so compact, their international portfolio is exceptionally broad. The first phase of the UTEC in the Peruvian capital, which began following an international competition in 2011, represents the farthest territory the practice have geographically occupied. The project is, in their words, a “man-made cliff” between the Pacific and the mountains – on one side a cascading garden, and on the other a “shoulder” to the city cast from bare concrete.
The scale and character of the UTEC belie a rich portfolio of smaller projects, which began in the mid-1990s. A specialism in higher education buildings has evolved out of successive competitions, culminating (prior to UTEC) in Milan’s Universita Luigi Bocconi (2008). Burrowed into a small site along one of the city’s wide, tall streets, the monumental twenty-two-meter interior cantilever of the building appears to defy gravity – or, in their words, exists “in dialogue with gravity.” The spatial control required to achieve this structural feat was, for Farrell, a simple matter of “positioning the two main beams on the roof, and then hanging the offices so they could act like soffits adjusted.”
