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Architecture biennale 2018: all hail the new queens of Venice

The appointment of Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara as curators of the great architecture biennale is striking – but no one who knows their work should be surprised

“I’m a rock person and she’s a bog person,” says Shelley McNamara of herself and Yvonne Farrell, her partner in Grafton Architects. She’s referring to their respective birthplaces in the stony west and the soggy middle of Ireland. Or perhaps it was Farrell speaking, in which case the pronouns need to be switched – my notes unpardonably fail to keep track of the badinage between them. Either way, the line nicely captures the preoccupations with place and physicality that inform their architecture. Their friendly interplay also reveals a working relationship that goes back to the early 70s when they were students together at University College Dublin.

Next month the 2018 Venice architecture biennale opens, under McNamara’s and Farrell’s curatorship. Theirs was a striking appointment for what is the world’s greatest exhibition and celebration of architecture, as they stand just outside the circuits of reputation and critical positioning that tend to generate biennale curators (who are appointed afresh for each edition). McNamara and Farrell are neither celebrities nor notable theorists. They are well-respected architects who, determinedly, consistently and over a long period of time, do their stuff. “It was a surprise to us to be invited,” they say, “and that’s putting it mildly.”

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2JCtO0G
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