International and intrepid, its buildings, most of them educational, try to bring knowledge and people, the street or the different branches of knowledge closer together.
Although they both smile and have made kindness a sine qua non condition since they met studying Architecture in Dublin, Yvonne Farrell (Tullamore, 1951) is sweet, and also not very Cartesian.
And Shelley McNamara (Lisdoonvarna, 1952), studious and blunt.
In Barcelona, a heat wave has made McNamara dizzy, who joins the conversation with her partner of 44 years late.
Congratulations on your award.
One more.
Yvonne Farrell:
It is not one more.
The best of Europe competes in the Mies looking for a message that can improve the world.
Has the time come to reward female architects?
YF:
Each project is an experiment and here, taking risks, we are right.
Uniting two antagonistic things —the movement of the dance and the stillness of a library— is either something crazy or a discovery.
In the end, one lives in constructed buildings, not in ideas.
One of the things that demoralizes us is that the public that gets excited at a tennis or football match is not interested in architecture.
I wonder if we have chosen a language that no one understands.
And what is answered?
YF:
Being trained as an architect is a privilege.
But we have a responsibility to society.
Therein lies the greatness of architecture: in preventing it from being a self-absorbed art.
The older you get, the clearer you see it.
Did they learn it in the School of Architecture?
YF:
It's humanity.
If anything defines the European Union, it is shared values, well-being —which can only be common— and freedom.
It is as important that a building does not have leaks as being able to sit in the shade of a chestnut tree.
We require our students to know about trees.
Architecture and landscape go together.
It is a mistake to separate them.
We are nature.
Architecture is not objects but connections.
It is something physical.
How has it become so theoretical?
YF:
When we have nothing better to do, we human beings start to think.
Architecture is values.
It is a living thing, an organism.
Shelley McNamara: Historically
, what makes architecture valuable is humanity and generosity.
Thinking of others is the key.
Being Irish, they have built around the world: from France to Peru and from Italy to Jordan.
SM:
We have competed a lot.
And we have learned traveling.
YF:
I came to Jordan to teach at the School of Architecture.
And he took the opportunity to get married in Cairo.
YF:
Michael de Courcy, who was also an architect, came from London.
And I came from Amman because we wanted to spend our honeymoon in Egypt.
It was the grand plan and it turned out to be one of the loneliest days of our lives.
We thought that we were enough with each other, that we were modern and unprejudiced.
And… we miss sharing the celebration.
It was a lesson in what it means to forget tradition and rituals.
How do you translate that lesson to architecture?
YF:
Buildings are not just infrastructure.
They represent desires, conquests, possibilities.
When we design a university, we not only think about the students, but also about the parents who kill themselves to give them a career.
We want going there to see your children graduate to fill them with the pride they deserve.
The buildings represent value systems.
When he got married, it was unusual for a couple of architects not to associate.
YF:
I was already associated with Shelley.
Then Michael died in an accident.
YF:
At the age of 29, in the summer of 1984, playing a friendly soccer match.
She was left alone with a nine-month-old son.
YF:
And Shelley helped me.
Today Mathew is a lawyer.
And a wonderful person.
He is happily married in Dublin.
They have been together for 44 years.
Much more than many marriages.
SM: We
share values.
Although we do not always think the same!
We respect each other.
That is the key.
Also that each one has a life outside the office.
His is with the painter Michael Caine.
SM:
And with his two children.
YF: There
were five of us when we started, colleagues from the university.
They called us “the Le Corbusier squad” because we thought he was the best architect.
Do you still think about it?
SM:
We are fascinated by your ability to mix the rational —construction— with the plastic-artistic.
Building the Bocconi University in Milan we learned that the structure, when it defines the space, speaks.
It has that power.
Hiding it is disguising.
Architects Yvonne Farrell, right, and Shelley McNamara, photographed at the Mies Van Der Rohe pavilion in Barcelona in May 2022. Caterina Barjau
They have been given the Mies van der Rohe Award from the European Union.
Should he be called Le Corbusier?
YF:
Mies van der Rohe was a great architect.
In Brno, he Tugendhat House is a monument to life and progress.
But the most famous, Farnsworth, disappointed me.
It is more an idea than a house.
And insisting on that is dangerous.
They defend a connected architecture.
SM:
We are more interested in what connects than what disconnects.
Some labyrinthine urbanisms bring people together in squares and streets.
Other orders separate it.
We are for what unites.
YF:
I lived in a house with a little garden in front and a patio behind.
With both doors open, it seemed to me that nature was passing through it.
Much of the architecture is nourished by own experiences.
Is paying attention to how architecture affects people a feminine quality?
YF:
I think most women are more considerate of others.
But I could say the same about kind men.
And not all women are nice.
It is a delicate discussion.
It has become dangerous territory.
We are different.
And that's nice.
Although the voice of women should be heard more.
SM:
Our office is a collective of men and women with different attitudes, skills and curiosities.
We are united by a more social than personal ambition.
We do not defend forms, we defend quality of life.
How many people work in your office?
YF:
Half.
SM:
It's a joke.
And it is not true.
We are 13 and they are all very hardworking.
Have you ever been paid less for being women?
YF: Not
at all.
He would have gone crazy.
It would be insulting.
SM:
In general, architects are underpaid compared to other professionals.
They are not valued.
But we have been our own bosses and surely we have paid ourselves less than we deserve.
However, it seems despicable to us that an architect charges less than an architect for doing the same job.
Have you had to sacrifice anything to be the professionals you are?
SM:
No. It's true that before we could get to college, women couldn't wear jeans.
We found the way made.
Have you felt questioned by your colleagues for valuing the emotional side of architecture?
YF:
Sometimes it's hard to use words like kindness or courtesy.
But it's not about being sweet.
It is about talking about what is necessary.
And it is just as necessary to talk about the shadow as about the structure.
Does the empathy or kindness that they defend guarantee good architecture?
YF: Not
at all.
There is a knack for making a building space better than imagined.
When we entered Bocconi University, under the 22 meter cantilever we saw that the forces of nature were suspended there.
How did you know it would work?
YF:
We didn't know, of course.
SM:
We had the 22 meter cantilever and just before submitting the proposal to the competition we added two columns.
The wonderful thing is that when we won, the university organized a team of engineers who proposed to us to remove the columns.
They would have been ridiculous.
Did they represent his fear or his caution?
YF:
Both.
Now, fortunately, they represent that a good relationship between engineers and architects improves architecture.
In the end, the buildings end up talking.
He talks about attributes that have little to do with sight: sound, touch...
YF:
Architecture that focuses only on the sense of sight is a problem for architecture.
In the press, the image counts, but a building cannot be explained in two dimensions.
is lost.
That's why at the Biennale we didn't want to talk about beautiful objects.
Architecture is space and space is the hole, the void, the nothing.
Alejandro de la Sota said it: “Architects should do as much nothing as possible”.
Are they religious?
YF:
I deeply believe in the beauty of life.
That to me is the meaning.
I believe in the universe as a whole and in the sacred importance of each moment.
Architects Yvonne Farrell, left, and Shelley McNamara, photographed at the Mies Van Der Rohe pavilion in Barcelona in May 2022. Caterina Barjau
What gives meaning to architecture?
YF:
Think of the people: the shadow, the benches for those who wait.
The overhang to shelter when it rains.
SM:
Architecture translates into a society the needs, the possibilities, the priorities.
Valuing touch over sight, is it giving value to crafts?
YF:
One of the problems of current architecture is the separation between designers and builders who become economic managers and stop looking for the best stone or the most expressive brick to focus on balancing the budget, which is also important.
But alone too.
I've only been down a river once, but I think making a building is like rafting: you risk everything.
SM:
Everything speaks in a building.
Even the color of the earth that is added to the mix to make the mortar.
What concerns you as architects?
SM:
The percentage of public places in cities has been drastically reduced in recent decades due to the privatization and commercialization of everyone's space, which defines the city.
The connection between buildings is like the air we breathe.
not seen
But it is vital.
And it is missing.
Is the awareness of caring a feminine attribute?
YF:
It is the ability to put yourself in the shoes of others and anticipate their needs.
There must be a light for those who arrive at a house.
A bench for those who get tired walking.
SM:
Touch humanizes buildings.
It transmits an intimacy that is not at odds with monumentality or with spaces that manage to elevate the spirit.
Skill is one thing, care is another.
Any profession well done helps and improves the world.
Much generosity from anonymous doctors, workers or gardeners has improved the world.
If as architects we do not have it, we are not contributing to improve society.
What is risk in architecture?
YF:
Build.
If you really thought about the risks that come with being an architect—in the building and in your business—you would be cooking pasta.
However, there are many architects who defend the need to take risks.
YF:
To live is to risk.
There is no profession that is exempt from risk.
If you diagnose, you risk;
if you write, take risks.
And if you don't, too.
In four decades of working together, who has changed the most?
YF:
We have been defining ourselves.
The same Shelley has not changed in one thing: she has never been content with what is right.
She has never stopped investigating.
She is much more confident than me, who is more of a mess: I have cats, I tend to the garden, I like to read fiction… Shelley prefers to investigate.
But we are friends.
We trust each other.
We respect each other.
You don't wake up one day with your arm around someone else's shoulder.
That is also built.
SM:
We are different.
We live independent lives and at the same time we have a lot in common.
We are surrounded by people who, throughout all these years, have enriched our intellectual world.
And emotional.
YF:
When Mike died and my son was nine months old, I thought I wouldn't be able to continue working.
But I was lucky that my in-laws and Shelley reminded me daily that all that pain would pass.
I have not forgotten.
Have they encountered special difficulties because they are women?
SM:
If we found them, we didn't realize it.
Or we ignore them.
YF:
It is true that, in 2008, they gave us an award for Bocconi University and the first question a journalist asked was: “What do your husbands think?”.
And she was a journalist.
We can be our worst enemy.
How did you know they had a husband?
YF:
We don't answer.
I just opened my mouth.
In life you don't have to be nice, but it's not smart not to be.
There is a difference between being kind and being servile.
Being kind relates you in a beautiful way with others.
Perhaps all this is due to the education we received or our families.
We were seven brothers.
SM:
We were four.
But we have also had extraordinary clients.
Every time we design a building we start from scratch.
That means that we always rethink our work.
It is stimulating, but it also requires knowing how to live with doubt.
Paradoxically, continually rethinking things is what has made us stronger.
What do you think is essential in a building?
YF:
The same as in a person: that it be close, that it improves life, that it ages well.
A building needs care.
Just like an individual, careless ones do not age well.
A neglected building is like a person who has lost the illusion of living.
It is proven that to live longer the essentials are friendship and laughter.
Then come more uncomfortable matters like taking showers in ice-cold water.
But the first two are a gift of life.
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