The Ladies* Lounge Part 2 Project 2023 Georgia Spencer University of Melbourne | Australia This project reimagines the Australian pub as a feminist centre, using architecture to critique gender stereotypes.By the 1900’s, 50% of publicans in Australia were women, a role that afforded women a degree of financial autonomy and increased their presence in public life. However, if women were still banned from voting and drinking at the public bar, the Government's incentive to employ women, was not concerned with gender equity... rather it reasserted her sexually prescribed tendency to ‘keep an orderly house’. Nowadays, the pub remains the pinnacle of male leisure in Australia, where two beers becomes six and one stumbles back home four-hours late.This project centers itself in a 1912 Warragul pub, a regional town where women predominately work in service- based fields, facing high rates of family violence from neighbouring Gippsland shires. If women spend their lives looking after others, how can the ‘pub’ embolden women to prioritise their leisure?Using irony and humour, this project builds on the sisterhood found in the toilet on a night out, where we gossip and make twenty new friends. It creates space for the activities society deems vain, enabling everyone to reclaim a version of femineity that supports the shared presence of women*, and their bodies in space. Tutor(s) Emilio Fuscaldo