GAD Editorial · Published · · English study · Chinese summary · Study dated 2026-10-06
Grafton Architects gives institutional buildings a substantial presence while making room for everyday encounters at their edges. The Dublin practice was established in 1978 by Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara with three other architects. Its name came from the street of the original office. That emphasis on place offers a useful starting point for reading its universities: a campus building has obligations to the pavement and neighbourhood as well as to the institution paying for it.
At Kingston University, Town House places an academic library, archive, dance studios and a studio theatre within one building. The university announced its opening on 6 January 2020. This mixture creates a demanding architectural problem. Reading and performance have different acoustic needs, yet separating them into unrelated wings would lose the possibility of seeing education as a shared activity. Grafton's arrangement gives the uses a common sequence of courtyard, circulation and outdoor spaces. Balconies and walkways lead towards a roof garden, allowing the building's collective territory to continue above the entrance floor.
The deep colonnade is important because it makes the boundary physically inhabitable. A glass wall can display an interior without offering a comfortable place to pause; here the structure creates a sheltered interval between street and room. RIBA's account describes a colonnade extending around the building and terraces above it. The result suggests a university that can be approached gradually, with spaces for waiting and meeting before a visitor commits to a particular destination. This is a spatial invitation, whose actual public value also depends on how the institution operates the building.
At Bocconi University's Via Roentgen building in Milan, completed in 2008, a different relationship between mass and ground produces a comparable civic ambition. Research and faculty accommodation sit above spaces for conferences and a public auditorium. The university describes floors suspended from major roof beams and a foyer visually connected to the sidewalk by a large glass wall. Light reaches down into the building through openings between its volumes. The structural arrangement helps explain the apparent contradiction of heavy forms hovering above comparatively open ground.
Read together, the projects make structure an instrument for deciding where people gather. At Bocconi, lifting accommodation creates a relationship between the institution and the city below. At Kingston, a repeated frame gives shared routes enough depth to become places in their own right. Neither arrangement requires every room to be continuously open to every other room. Their generosity depends on a deliberate hierarchy between concentrated work, circulation and collective occupation.
For designers, Grafton's work is particularly instructive in section. Following the path of daylight and the position of a person moving between levels reveals more than a study of the exterior alone. The recurring question is how a large institution can offer recognisable, human-scale places without losing its public presence. Its strongest answers make that negotiation visible in the building's construction.