Charles Rice is a professor of architecture in the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building at UTS. He studies formations of the interior in architecture and design, looking at the spaces we occupy and the ways in which they shape our social and cultural lives. Rice's early research was focused on the emergence of the domestic interior within western culture from the 19th century onwards; currently, his work explores large-scale urban interiors.

Rice's research has been funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC) through its Discovery Projects Scheme, and he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan in 2022. He has published three books: The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (2007), which established the domestic interior as a modern category, charting its impact on key debates in architecture and design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (2016), which uses Portman’s vast urban interiors to understand the changing developmental landscape of the post-war American city; and Atrium (2023), which charts the rise of the large-scale atrium spaces through the 1970s and 80s and how they changed the way buildings are designed, constructed, regulated, and occupied.

Rice is currently a member of the ARC's College of Experts. From 2012-2019, he was Co-editor and then Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architecture, the peer-reviewed journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). He has been invited to lecture at universities and cultural institutions internationally, including the Architectural Association (London), UCL's Bartlett School of Architecture, the Berlage and TU Delft, HEAD Genève, Parsons (New York), the Catholic University of Chile, and Hong Kong University. He has acted as an external examiner for undergraduate, graduate and research degrees at universities in Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, South Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA.

Educated in Australia and the UK, Rice has previously taught at the University of New South Wales, the Architectural Association, and Kingston University London, where he was Head of the School of Art and Design History.