Exhibition: Field Notes from Elsewhere

About Zachary Colbert’s work

During his sabbatical, Associate Professor Zachary Colbert travelled the length of the lower Colorado River basin to conduct site documentation and interviews.

His work in this exhibition consists of 29 maps and photocollages. It comes from his first publication of this research in the Worlding, Energy, Transitions issue of the Journal of Architectural Education.

Using architectural media, it reframes iconic Colorado Plateau landscapes to expose processes of imperial property formation, Indigenous dispossession, and environmental inequity. Architecture and urbanism are deeply implicated in these transformations as their primary expression.

 Through constructed maps and photocollages, this work challenges dominant ways of seeing and knowing the Colorado Plateau. The visible artifacts of image-making — clips, lights, cut edges — invite the viewer into the process of construction. By using the camera sensor as a drawing instrument, these collages ask viewers to confront the historicity of the land and question the authenticity embedded in dominant cultural perceptions of these landscapes.

Colbert’s work, conducted in Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, examines the Law of the River and its architectures through archival and field research.

By tracing resource flows governed by the Law of the River — water, electricity, uranium, coal, and property formation itself — this work expands narratives of postwar growth in central Arizona and southern California. It reveals the environmental, urban, and political transformations that have reshaped the southwestern US, offering new readings of the hydro-infrastructures that underpin urbanization throughout this place.

About Ozayr Saloojee’s work

Professor Ozayr Saloojee’s contribution to this exhibition is a drawing project in two parts.

The first, An Argument for Unknowing I: Core, is a set of drawings depicting 15 buildings: three each from Rome, Cairo, Fez, Andalusia, and Istanbul. Using a process of “as-built,” and “as-remembered,” the project uses architectural drawings, photographs, video, archival material, and Saloojee’s experience of visiting these sites as the base materials for the drawings. 

The project attempts to problematize the “analytique,” a drawing problem characteristic to Beaux-Arts method, one of the banner pedagogies in early North American schools of architecture. It seeks to destabilize the analytique as a device that ultimately occludes the experience and knowing of worlds claimed by Eurocentric paradigms. 

The second part, An Argument for Unknowing II: Gap and Seam, uses a historical ritual procession from the Ottoman Empire — the Sultan’s gift of baklava to the Janissaries as a point of departure.

 Here, the convention shifts from elevation to section and plan.  It depicts an unfolded sectional/plan of the Sultan’s walk from his quarters in the Topkapi Palace, through the palace kitchens, and onto the gate of the Janissary quarters, with the Hagia Sophia and Hagia Eirene complexes behind.

 This unfolded scroll is an attempt to grapple with European models of drawing as devices for knowing architecture and invites readers to consider the larger associated ecologies that these types of drawings can omit, or render “unusable.”