Cork Centre for Architectural Education graduate receives prestigious RIBA commendation

10 Dec 2025

Ellie O'Connell, has been 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).

Presented by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) for 189 years, the President’s Medals recognise the world’s best work by architecture students. 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".  

Congratulations also to Ellie's Dissertation Tutor Peter Luddy, and to Tara Kennedy and Sarah Mulrooney for leading the Dissertation group.