Writing Rooms at the Whitlam Prime Ministerial Home

The workshop will be held at the family home of Australia’s 21st Prime Minister, the Hon Gough Whitlam AC QC. Western Sydney University restored the former prime ministerial home after buying it in a state of disrepair in 2021. The Whitlam Institute is entrusted in perpetuity to manage and protect this important national heritage asset. 

Sophie Lanigan is the editor of Union Magazine, which covers architecture, design and art that is experimental, conceptual and critical, and foregrounds the ideas behind each work. Publishing work across a variety of scales, typologies and media, Union connects agendas expressed though spatial practice. The editorial team collates information, develops articles, interviews and videos, curates exhibitions and coordinates initiatives that cultivate interdisciplinary cooperation. Union is independently researched and edited to reflect the rigour and complexity embedded in the work it represents. The magazine examines a cross-section of architectural, artistic and design pursuits to provide a detailed print record of contemporary practice.

Charles Rice investigates formations of the interior and the ways these shape our social and cultural lives. He was a 2020 Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan. He is author of The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (2007), Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (2016) and Atrium (forthcoming, 2023). From 2012–2019, Charles was the Co-editor and then Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architecture, the peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Rice is a professor of architecture at UTS.