“We were hungry for this opportunity to go back to first principles,” says Shelley McNamara, 2020 Pritzker Award recipient together with her partner at Grafton Architects, Yvonne Farrell, about building in wood. In addition to being awarded architecture’s highest honor earlier this month, the pair have just been selected to construct the Anthony Timberlands Center for Design and Materials Innovation at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. It will be the Dublin-based firm’s first project in the U.S.
While the center will also be Grafton’s first timber project, both McNamara and Farrell have researched building with the renewable resource with their students over the last several years. They pointed to “the earth as client” in the manifesto for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, themed “Freespace,” for which they were the curators. “Wood structures like the Petäjävesi Old Church in Finland from 1763, or the timber roof of the Salisbury Cathedral from 1220 have existed for centuries,” says Farrell, “Talk about sustainable!”
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