UL alumni Maeve Curley and Sean William Murphy who graduated in 2017 have been shortlisted for the prestigious Young Talent Architecture Award (YTAA). The award is organised by the Fundació Mies van der Rohe (Barcelona) with the support of Creative Europe as an extension of the European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award. YTAA brings together the best graduation projects from European architecture, urban planning and landscape schools, this years joined for the first time by schools from China and South Korea. Over 450 students from 118 schools around the world submitted 334 projects of which 40 were selected to compete for the YTAA’s second edition since 2016.

Maeve Curley designed a layer of sporting infrastructure built on top of Limerick’s Georgian grid. Committed to the idea of ‘giving back,’ her thesis “Civic Games” proposed to hold Olympic Games that work at the scale of the city, and its arenas become civic spaces after the games. http://ytaa.miesbcn.com/work/372

 In his thesis project “Benevolent Scarring,” Sean William Murphy designed a new maternity hospital for Limerick that engages sensibly with the surrounding urban fabric of a former working class neighbourhood. His proposal brings a maternity hospital back to its very nature, back to the domestic and human scale. http://ytaa.miesbcn.com/work/373

 All shortlisted projects are on display at the European Cultural Centre in the Palazzo Mora in Venice to coincide with the Architecture Biennale 2018. The four winning entries will be announced on 28 June 2018. The exhibition will later travel to architecture schools throughout Europe.

Image by Jan Frohburg.