About

Ozayr is a South African/Canadian (b. Johannesburg) teacher and designer whose scholarship and creative practice practice is themed around the notion of architecture enacted otherwise, where design is a practice of tender epistemic repair. 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. Interested in disciplinary questions of architecture, his work also looks beyond disciplinary boundaries in order to ground/unground and locate/re-locate new, shared centers of architectural discourse.

He is presently a Full Professor of Architecture at Carleton University in Ottawa, and Chair of the PhD and MAS (Master of Architectural Studies) programs, cross-appointed faculty at the university’s Institute for African Studies and affiliate faculty in its Center for the Study of Islam. From 2021-2025, he served as the Journal of Architectural Education’s Associate Editor of Design, and in 2023 was appointed as an Adjunct Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Minnesota. He taught for twelve years at the University of Minnesota’s School of Architecture, where he was the 2014-2016 Imagine Chair in the Arts, Design and Humanities, leading a 3-year program of interdisciplinary design education, public engagement, grant-writing and research. At the University of Minnesota, he was affiliate faculty in Landscape Architecture and in Religious Studies.

He studied at Carleton University, completing his B.Arch and Post Professional M.Arch II (Theory and Culture) at the School of Architecture. He received his PhD from the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL (supervised by Dr. J.K. Birksted and Dr. Ian Borden, and examined by Dr. Davide Deriu (Westminster) and Dr. Jonathan Hill (Bartlett)). At Carleton (since 2017), he teaches courses in architectural design, urbanism and history & theory, representation and drawing, exploring themes and questions of infrastructure, water,  anti-colonial practice, and alternative urban and landscape futures. His research and academic interests orbit around politically contested terrains, infrastructure and landscapes through architecture, landscape and cultural geographies. He maintains an active research interest in the art and architecture of the Islamic world, exploring questions of tradition and modernity, with a focus on Istanbul and South Africa. 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 on the colonial footprints of museums.

His creative, curatorial and academic practice has been presented at venues in Canada, the United States, Turkey, Europe, African and Japan, with authored and co-authored works  published by Oxford University Press, the University of Toronto Press, Set Margins Press‘, Transmediale (Berlin), Ashgate, and A2. He recently guest edited an issue 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 and research have received recognition from the American Institute of Architects-Minneapolis, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) and from 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, Ozayr 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.

He remains involved in a number of interdisciplinary, multi-partner and multi-university collaborations, including the Great Lakes Design Lab at the University of Minnesota (directed by Karen Lutsky at the University of Minnesota), the Institute for Freshwater Fish Futures (directed by Dr. Zoe Todd at Simon Frasier University), and holds an appointment as affiliate faculty in the College of Interdisciplinary Sciences at Royal Roads University in Vancouver. Ozayr has been an invited design critic at schools across Turtle Island, in Europe and South Africa – including recently at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, Columbia University’s GSAPP, the Royal College of Art (London), Cornell University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, the University of British Columbia, McGill University, the University of Toronto, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of Michigan, the University of Buffalo, and the California College for the Arts.