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Title: Lavoirs: Washhouses of Rural France by Mireille Roddier, Billie Tsien ISBN: 1-56898-392-1 Publisher: Princeton Architectural Press Pub. Date: 01 July, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $24.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Roddier Cleans Up! (Seriously, this book is great!)
Comment: Mireille Roddier reveals the humble rural lavoirs as a locus of architectural beauty, french cultural history, and, perhaps most importantly, the neglected landscape of women's spaces. In her essay, Roddier plays brilliantly on the various meanings and histories of laundry (only the very rich always had clean laundry)-- and of laundresses (often thought of as dangerous gossips--because lavoirs were all female, and therefore suspicious, like 7 Sister's colleges)-- a discourse which is still being richly reinvented in today's unceasing obsessions with detergents and "soap operas." The photographs alone are worthy of the book's price--they look out at the reader with a stand-alone energy that evokes the very French, ornately philosophical ideas of the revolution of 1789, when even architecture had to reflect radical, communalist ideas. I'm not an architectural historian, but I think that this book belongs to feminist theory as well as to the history of architecture. It takes the reader to the point where aesthetics becomes or displaces theory, albeit extremely modestly.

Rating: 5
Summary: Simply fabulous
Comment: What an outstanding effort. Through truly beautiful photographs and remarkable sketches, Mireille Roddier reminds us that the French patrimony is historically rich of great architecture.
A must read.

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