Description
External examiner for the M.Arch.She is Senior Lecturer at the SAUL School of Architecture University of Limerick, Ireland, and has been reviewer in several architecture schools worldwide. She is founder and director of HassettDucatez Architects. Her work has received the Downes Medal for Architectural Excellence, 11 prestigious architectural awards in Ireland, been nominated for the Mies Van Der Rohe prize and the UK YAYA prize, and has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale amongst other featured, lectured, published, or exhibited scenarios nationally and internationally.
In August 2015, she founded The Calais Builds project, in response to the worsening humanitarian refugee crisis in Europe. By matching people, funds, sponsorship drives and architecture/building skills the project has built some of the key community infrastructure at Calais refugee camp, such as the Women and Children's Centre, Youth Centre, Community Centre and the Vaccination Centre. This project has grown to reflect on the building and breaking of structures - legal, physical, environmental and social- in the migration route. It is a story of architecture and building without budgets, without political will, without a future, and without hope, devoid entirely of the utopian hubris surrounding architecture, but for and with people.
Grainne is taking the research into humanitarian response into teaching and she leads the MArch (SAUL) Studio Global Practice: International Practice Programme that responds to the changing nature of architectural practice and research globally with an innovative new programme. The unit will examine, among other things, issues of migration, climate justice, validity of western construct of architectural theory, unplanned urbanisation, the question of ethical responsibility, the purpose of architecture, the purpose and value of craft, cheap building, labour conditions, the relationship of architecture to capital, the relationship of materials and people to capital, the need for authority and the question of agency and legitimacy and ultimately are we any use to the world?
Grainne's work is a fundamental new way of considering the role of architects in response to a humanitarian crisis that is set to continue and grow - this agenda impacts on all aspects of architectural research, teaching and practice.
| Period | 2016 → 2017 |
|---|---|
| Visiting from | Hassett-Ducatez Architects (Ireland)University of Limerick (Ireland)University of Sheffield (United Kingdom) |
| Degree of Recognition | International |