WITHIN THESE WALLS
Project Description
The Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum opened in the summer of 1872, and was abandoned in 1994. The number of women who passed through its walls remains unknown, the stories of their penitent enslavement untold. The architecture that witnessed this past has since fallen victim to time. Whitewashed over with redevelopments or left to decay, the laundries are disappearing. Their place in the collective memory hangs in the balance, dwindling in the walls of their ruins. Taking what remains of the Cork Good Shepherd Magdalen Asylum as a point of entry, I have endeavoured to decipher the fragments of the ruin as a reference to the whole, to, as Victor Hugo writes in Notre-Dame de Paris, turn the mountain of architecture into the imperishable flock of birds - the petrified memory into the narrative one.
A copy of the thesis is available from the University of Waterloo library here.