Shelley McNamara was born in Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, in 1952 and studied architecture at University College Dublin, where she began teaching in 1976 alongside her studio partner Yvonne Farrell. The two founded Grafton Architects in 1978 and spent two quiet decades on modest Irish commissions — the Urban Institute at UCD, a community school at Milford in Donegal, an arts centre at Navan — while building an international teaching career that took McNamara to Yale's Louis Kahn chair and to visiting posts in Switzerland. She has described the practice's method as building the structure first and letting the space follow from it rather than the reverse, a principle legible in the terraced, top-lit halls of the Bocconi University extension in Milan. She and Farrell received the Pritzker Prize and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal in 2020.
