Confining the Other: Gender and Architecture at the Limerick Magdalene Laundry Part 1 Dissertation 2025 Ellie O’Connell University College Cork | Ireland This dissertation examines the Good Shepherd Magdalene Laundry, Limerick, as an architectural actualisation of gendered othering within Ireland’s institutional history. The site is studied as an architecture of exclusion and erasure, operating within a system that marginalised transgressive women under the guise of moral reform.The research positions the Laundry within a 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. Tutor(s) Tara Kennedy Peter Luddy Sarah Mulrooney