Architecture|Pritzker Prize-winning Irish architect Yvonne Farrell lectured at the Aalto symposium. Farrell appreciates both Pia Ilo and Juhani Pallasmaa among Finnish architects.
Jyväskylä
When Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara organized the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, they asked a Finnish architect to participate Pia Ilonen and founded by him Architect office Tallin.
Farrell invited the then President of Ireland of Mary Robinson to get to know the Stable department.
“I said this would be the solution to Ireland’s screaming housing problem”.
It was about building a loft, i.e. creating a space that the residents themselves finish according to their own views and needs. Ilonen’s loft apartments have been built to Arabia and Kruunuvuorenranta, among others.
Irish architect Yvonne Farrell has come to talk about the work of her and Shelley McNamara’s Grafton Architects office at the Alvar Aalto symposium in Jyväskylä.
Farrell and Shelley received the Pritzker Prize, which has been compared to the Nobel of architecture, four years ago for their work, which includes several universities around the world.
in Ireland it has been an exceptionally rainy summer, which has increased concern about climate change. According to Farrell, architects can do a lot to curb climate change.
For example, focusing on new uses for buildings that have fallen into disuse is important. He says that there are a large number of vacant buildings in Ireland that should be repaired and put into use.
Material awareness is also important. Increasing wood construction has been seen as one solution to reducing emissions. However, that is not entirely clear-cut either, but requires more research.
In Arkansas, USA, a wood construction research center was established in connection with the University of Architecture, which was designed by Grafton Architects – of course, out of wood. Farrell says that not all building material was obtained from America, but some had to be brought from Austria.
“In the end, it would have been cheaper to build a house in Austria and bring it whole to America,” he sighs. Still, he considers the goals of the research center called Timberland to be important and ambitious.
The energy industry, the building materials industry, as well as wood construction must be challenged to tackle climate change.
Grafton Architects -the name of the office comes from a pedestrian street in Dublin. The office, which implements large projects around the world, employs only 38 people, which is surprisingly few when you think about their large-scale projects around the world.
Several universities have entered Grafton’s job list through competition wins. The first came to Milan, Luigi Bocconi’s yiopisto in 2008. The new building of the London School of Economics, LSE, is also their work. The University of Toulouse was built from material made by a local factory.
Utec University in Lima, Peru is a huge project, the first phase of which was completed in 2015 and the second phase is currently being prepared. Its design was the subject of an international architectural competition, the judging panel of which also included a Finnish architect, a professor Juhani Pallasmaa.
Farrell says that he has read Pallasmaa’s texts on architecture and praises them: “He makes architecture poetry in his texts,” he says.
He digs one of Pallasmaa’s books out of his bag and reads an excerpt from it: “The door handle is the handshake of the building”.
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