The confluence seemed perfect: just after being awarded the Pritzker Prize on March 3, Dublin-based Grafton Architects should also have been celebrating the completion of a suite of three stunning academic buildings. The trio lined up along a meridian through western Europe, from Kingston-upon-Thames, just west of London (Kingston University Town House), south to the outskirts of Paris (Institut Mines-Télécom, Paris-Saclay), then to Toulouse, France. But with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic’s closing universities and canceling travel, instead of a celebration, it has been a time for introspection for Grafton founding partners Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara. “The lesson of the coronavirus,” says Farrell, “is that architecture is a physical experience and that humans react to space physically.” Without the physical relationship, she suggests, there is no emotion in architecture.
Few new buildings make the absence of physical experience more regrettable than the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), which is arguably the greatest in their recent triumvirate of powerful, sophisticated buildings. While the IMT building outside Paris successfully conjures up its own architectural language amid the semi-academic, semicorporate environment of a new research park, it is less nuanced than the TSE’s; the building in Kingston gives a sprawling ad hoc campus a presence on the main road, but it is limited in its scope.
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