Grafton Architects is an Irish practice founded in Dublin in 1978 by Yvonne Farrell (born 1951) and Shelley McNamara (born 1952), who began teaching together at University College Dublin in 1976; it takes its name from the city's Grafton Street. Specialising in universities, they use weighty materials such as stone and concrete to make spacious buildings that bring people together. McNamara has described their approach: "rather than thinking of a space and then finding a structure for it, we make a structure and that, in turn, makes a space". They curated the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, "Freespace", and shared the Pritzker Prize in 2020, the year the practice also received the RIBA Royal Gold Medal.
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The Universita Luigi Bocconi Building in Milan (2008) first drew international attention to the practice. The UTEC University Campus in Lima (2015), for the University of Engineering and Technology, won the RIBA International Prize in 2016 as the best new building in the world that year. The Toulouse School of Economics (2019) followed, and the Marshall Building, London School of Economics (2022), won in competition in 2016.
