Yvonne Farrell was born in Tullamore, County Offaly, in 1951 and trained at University College Dublin, where she has taught since 1976. In 1978 she and Shelley McNamara founded Grafton Architects, naming the practice after the Dublin street of their first office rather than after themselves. Ireland's building programme in the 1980s and 1990s gave the young practice little to build, and its reputation grew instead through teaching and through small, exacting commissions — schools, a library, a health centre — before the Milan economics university Bocconi and the engineering campus UTEC in Lima brought international recognition for a manner of building in raw concrete, section and light rather than surface. Farrell and McNamara shared the 2020 Pritzker Prize, the first won by an Irish practice, and the RIBA Royal Gold Medal the same year.
