Congratulations to Ellie O'Connell, CCAE Graduate, on her commendation for the 2025 RIBA Dissertation Prize
CCAE Graduate, Ellie O'Connell, receives a commendation for the 2025 RIBA Dissertation Prize. Ceremony took place in The Royal Society in London.
On Wednesday 3 December, Ellie O'Connell, was awarded a commendation for the RIBA Dissertation Prize for her dissertation titled, "Confining the Other: Gender and Architecture at the Limerick Magdalene Laundry". Ellie is a 2025 graduate from the BSc Hons in Architecture, a joint UCC/MTU programme, at Cork Centre for Architectural Education (CCAE). The awards took place in London at The Royal Society and Ellie was joined by her family and partner, along with her dissertation tutors, Peter Luddy and Tara Kennedy.
As she writes, her research "positions the Laundry within feminist theoretical framework, drawing on Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex to analyse how institutional architecture produced and maintained the category of woman as 'Other'.
Analysing architectural archival material and survivor testimony, the study constructs a spatial reading of the institution as an instrument of control, mapping how design enforced the segregation, dehumanisation, and containment of the women and girls confined within.
The Limerick Magdalene Laundry and Ireland’s institutional landscape stand as stark admonition of architecture’s potential to embody and enforce otherisation. In confronting this legacy, we are compelled to remember the egregious injustices of our recent past and interrogate the spatial practices of the present. To confine a woman as Other was to render her invisible both spatially and socially, and the laundries materialised this philosophical positioning in reality, imposed through architecture, hidden in plain sight".
From all of us at CCAE, we are very proud of Ellie's achievement and well done to her Dissertation Tutor Peter Luddy and both Tara Kennedy and Sarah Mulrooney for leading the Dissertation group.
Some key images and an abstract can found on the RIBA's President Medal's website: https://www.presidentsmedals.com/Entry-19950
A video of the whole ceremony is available via the link here: RIBA President's Medal Ceremony 2025
A thanks to RIBA who provided us with these photographs by Jackie King of the prizegiving ceremony!
Photograph © Jackie King, courtesy RIBA