First Time Ever: Pritzker Architecture Prize Awarded to 2 Women

History Makers

The coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize, seen as the Nobel of the architectural world, has been awarded to two women for the very first time.

Shelley McNamara and Yvonne Farrell of Dublin, Ireland, have been named the 2020 winners. It is the first time that the prestigious honor has been given to two female architects in one year, though there have been previous female winners.

“When we win a prize, it is an extraordinary endorsement of the hard work that ourselves and our team have been involved in over the many years of practice,” Farrell said in a video released by the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

“It also endorses our position and our philosophy, let’s call it, in terms of what architecture is and how one should practice,” McNamara added. “Being given this recognition gives us a sense of being more empowered to continue doing what we are doing.”

Partners Who Believe

The two women co-founded their firm, Grafton Architects, 42 years ago, after meeting during their collegiate years at the School of Architecture at University College Dublin in the mid-1970s. Their long journey is finally recognized by the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize.

“Shelley is unbelievably tenacious. I would say fearless as well,” Farrell said of her colleague. “Shelley is an architect in every molecule of her existence. She will not let things be other than the very best.”

McNamara has only praise for Farrell as well. “Yvonne has an enormous sense of humanity and integrity and she has the talent to bring that right into the center of our work,” she said.

Throughout their years in the industry, the women and their firm have taken a special interest in creating buildings for schools and universities, making one of their first major designs in the 1990s when they created a building for Trinity College in Dublin. From there they went on to design houses, schools and even helped redesign Dublin’s Temple Bar Square.

The first building that the pair ever created outside of Ireland didn’t come until 2003, when their firm won an international competition to design the prestigious School of Economics at the University Luigi Bocconi in Milan. That building went on to be named World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in 2008, when it was finally completed, and established Grafton Architects as a leader in university buildings.

“We’re passionately interested in education,” McNamara said during a 2015 lecture at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. “The university should be a place where knowledge is tended to like a garden. And we’re the guardians of knowledge.”

The Pritzker Architecture Prize was first established in 1979. Only three other women have won in the past — Zaha Hadid in 2004, Kazuyo Sejima in 2010 (with Ryue Nishizawa) and Carme Pigem in 2017 (with Ramón Vilalta and Rafael Aranda).