Ozayr Saloojee

Professor

• Email Ozayr Saloojee

Ozayr Saloojee (b. Johannesburg, South Africa) is a Professor of Architecture and chair of the PhD and MAS programs at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University. He is a cross-appointed faculty member at the university’s Institute for African Studies and an affiliate faculty member in Carleton’s Centre for the Study of Islam. In 2023, he was appointed as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota. He taught for 12 years at the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture, where he was the 2014-2016 Imagine Chair in the Arts, Design and Humanities, and affiliate faculty in Landscape Architecture and Religious Studies. Dr. Saloojee served as the Journal of Architectural Education’s Associate Editor of Design from 2021 to 2025.

At Carleton (since 2017), he teaches courses in design, urbanism, history and theory, representation, and drawing, exploring an architecture enacted otherwise, where design is a practice of epistemic dreaming and transformation. He is interested in architecture’s entanglements with fuller material, cultural, and political worlds, and has long been preoccupied with the question of “fit” and its attendant ecosystem of power, authority, privilege, diaspora, borders, and belonging. His research and creative practice revolve around politically contested terrains, infrastructure and landscapes, and he maintains an active scholarly interest in the art and architecture of the Islamic world. He has led studios and seminars on future scenarios for the Great Lakes, on the hydro-politics of Palestine, on water, equity and urban transformation in Istanbul, on refusal, labour and the mining landscapes of Johannesburg, on drawing and the visual culture of Andalucia (Granada, Cordoba and Sevilla), on urban and design-justice and the colonial footprints of museums.

His creative, curatorial, and academic practice has been presented at venues in Canada, the United States, Turkey, Europe, Africa, Korea, and Japan, with authored and co-authored works published by Oxford University Press, the University of Toronto Press, Set Margins; Press, Transmediale, Ashgate,  and A2. He guest-edited a volume of AD, titled “Architectures of Refusal,” and is currently working on a manuscript (with Professor Jamie Vanucchi from Cornell University) on Design Research for Uncertain Futures (Oro, 2024). His teaching, research and service have received recognition from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the AIA-Minneapolis, the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) and Architect Magazine. He served as a founding and core team member for the “Fluid Boundaries” collaborative, which was shortlisted to represent Canada’s contribution to the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. With the HiLo/YOW+ collective, Saloojee was part of the team shortlisted to represent Canada at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. A member of Dark Matter University, his teaching, research and creative practice was part of the DMU contribution to the 2023 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.