Reviews for Architecture in Europe since 1968

The average rating for Architecture in Europe since 1968 based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-24 00:00:00 Jeffrey Dennis Rage. That’s probably the only thing that comes to mind when I read this book. A book about the Magdalen Laundries of Ireland where society without thought sent their ‘fallen’ women, the victims of rape, incest and even young girls who might breed temptation in the other sex. A place where they were forgotten, forced into slave labor with no idea when there sentence would end. Rage because of sentences like “Alice disowned at 16 spent 56 years in the laundry before dying in closely veiled silence”. Rage when I read an interview with the Reverend Mother when ask about the consequences for the men and she says “yes its terrible that he is able to marry, live and die in respectability.......” while trying to justify that “life in these laundries is beautiful and peaceful......”. Rage at the State, the Catholic Church, the families and society for allowing these laundries to operate right up until 1996 announcing the closure only due to the fact at it was no longer financially viable to continue. Rage when in 1993, 155 remains are exhumed and they cannot name almost 40 of the remains and the women of the last operating laundry are denied the right to go to the reburial of those women. I could go on and on but what about the book itself. In part 1 the author asked the reader to try to remain impartial as he lays out the facts and as you can see from the above paragraph I cannot do that but he can and he gives in-depth detail of how these laundries came about, how the state was complicit in allowing the Catholic Church to run them without any state intervention or inspection. He details the bills that were past that lead to the opening of these laundries and how as the rest of the world were closing their homes for unwed mothers, Ireland was doing the opposite. Part 2 of the book takes you to the cultural impact of how these laundries were seen by the rest of the world when the release of the play called ‘Elipsed’ by Patricia Burke Brogan was released opening the country’s eyes. A series of documentaries were release from various countries try to discover who is culpable, each one highlighting a different culprit. We learn that these documentaries and films were done through the survivor accounts and through research as the Catholic Church still fails to acknowledge or release any documentation regarding the inmates of the Magdalen Laundries. Nor have the survivors had an apology or recompensation for what happened to them. The whole book left me saddened and enraged, mainly because we will continue to repeat history because we fail to acknowledge it. We fail to put up our hands up and say ‘Yes we did that’ but we know better now. We fail to teach it as part of our history, but maybe if we did then our children and grandchildren might realize that those are the horrors they don’t want to repeat.

Review # 2 was written on 2007-07-07 00:00:00 Demetre Kirizopoulos In a very elitist but nonetheless informed summary of modern architectural movements, Charles Jencks enlightens the reader to a number of very short lived but nonetheless interesting architectural movements. It's probably about as dry as you can get, though, so you have to be really interested in modern architecture.