Ozayr Saloojee

ozayrsaloojee@cunet.carleton.ca

Born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa, Professor Ozayr Saloojee previously taught at the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, where, in addition to his teaching in the School of Architecture, he was appointed the University of Minnesota’s 2014-2016 Imagine Chair in the Arts, Design and Humanities and served as affiliate faculty in Landscape Architecture and in the Religious Studies Program. Before moving to the USA in 2005, he studied, taught and practiced architecture in Ottawa, receiving his B.Arch and Post-professional M.Arch II (Theory and Culture) from Carleton University. He completed his doctoral research at the Bartlett School of Architecture (University College London) supervised by Dr. J. K. Birksted and Dr. Iain Borden, and examined by Dr. Davide Deriu (Westminster) and Dr. Jonathan Hill (Bartlett).

At Carleton since January 2017, he teaches courses in architectural design, urbanism and history & theory, exploring themes and questions of infrastructure,  de-coloniality, and alternative urban and landscape futures. His research and academic interests include a focus on politically contested terrains and infrastructure through the intersections of architecture, landscape, cultural geographies and geo-imaginaries, as well as questions of tradition, modernity and representation in Islamic Art and Architecture. He has led studios on future scenarios for the Great Lakes, on urban imaginaries (through Ottoman miniature painting) for Istanbul and, and on equity, wealth, privilege, spatial justice and labour in the mining landscapes of Johannesburg. The Deep Dust/Killing Dark Studio on Johannesburg’s extractive terrains was one of Architect Magazine’s 2020 Studio Prize awardees. He has a number of parallel research projects including  “The Incommensurate Archive,” an outcome of his doctoral work that explores the issue of the archival gap in South Africa’s colonial past and de- (and counter-) colonial present and “An Accountability of Love/An Argument for Unknowing” which explores questions of order and opportunity in drawings (both as-built and as-remembered) to think though embodied, locally subjective counter-knowledges. He has presented his research at venues in Cape Town, Japan, Istanbul, the United Kingdom, Canada and the USA and has worked on a number of creative projects, including the Mobilizing Materialities exhibition and symposium (a partnership with the international World of Matter artists collaborative), in addition to projects with the Walker Art Center and MIA (Minneapolis Institute of Art). He is one of the founding members of the Fluid Boundaries Collective (with colleagues from Architecture, Geography, Anthropology & Indigenous and Canadian Studies), who were shortlisted to curate Canada’s contribution to the 2020 Venice Architecture Biennale.  

He remains involved in several interdisciplinary, multi-partner and multi-university collaborations, including the Great Lakes Design Lab at the University of Minnesota (with colleagues from Cornell University). Here in Ottawa, he co-directs, with Professor Catherine Bonier, the Carleton Urban Research Lab (c-url) whose focus centers on water, cities and equity. He is cross-appointed at Carleton’s Institute for African Studies and is serving as the Associate Editor of Design for JAE – the Journal of Architectural Education (2021-2024). He is, with Professor Johan Voordouw, a co-founder of the Ottawa-based design practice, (SAL-VO), and has been an invited critic at Harvard University, the University of Virginia, the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto, UW-Milwaukee, the University of Michigan, the University of Waterloo, the University of Buffalo, and the California College for the Arts.