EDUCATOR | DESIGNER | ARCHITECT

With a background in architectural design and a keen interest in postcolonial, decolonial, and critical urban theories, my teaching and research activities are centered on investigating, revealing, and rethinking our discipline’s ties to dominant power structures and entrenched economic interests — and how architecture in both its pedagogic and professional forms can take a radical turn, paving the way for non-exploitative and non-extractive practices focused on care and recovery. Wary of how strictly siloed and insular architectural education can be, my courses — studios and seminars alike, encourage students to move across disciplines, geographies, and cultures in search of diverse perspectives, new familiarities, deeper understanding, and spatial solutions that speak loudly for social and ecological change.

From September 2021 to June 2024, I was Visiting Assistant Professor and Visiting Faculty Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice in the School of Architecture & Environment, University of Oregon. My responsibilities included teaching both studio and seminar courses, along with research and service engagements.

From January 2014 to June 2022 [on leave from July 2021 to June 2022], I was Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi — where I also had the privilege of leading the Department of Architecture from Jan 2015 to Jun 2019. As Head of Department, I was able to build a team of early-career faculty members and together we were able to revisit a number of administrative and academic policies; restructure the curriculum keeping local, regional, and larger geographical challenges at the center; restructure the summer internship program; reorient pedagogical approaches towards creating more critical and creative learning environments; and initiate an architectural research and design lab invested in research and design projects in the city of Karachi — from designing and building low-cost, energy-efficient housing to reclaiming and reimagining urban open spaces at neighborhood scales.

Also at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, I served on several advisory and review committees, including but not limited to those of the liberal arts core and the graduate program.

My academic career, however, began in July 2012 at the Department of Architecture and Planning, NED-UET [also in Karachi] where I had the pleasure of working under the mentorship of Professor Noman Ahmed.

I am also associated with GCAS-Jehan, a de-centered node of the Dublin-based Global Center for Advanced Studies directed by Professor Asma Abbas. Promoting transdisciplinary, collaborative, and anti-colonial processes of knowing and being, the node hosts and encourages the creation of shared knowledges anchored in, responding to, and serving mutualities across the Global South understood not as a fixed geographical location, but as the moving subaltern/ized positionalities of social actors and institutions in the system of global political and economic power.

In addition, I offer and host free and open to public lectures and conversations through Navigating Noplace — an online platform that I recently started for students and early-career academics interested in anti-colonial discourse and critical pedagogies in architecture and related disciplines.

In 2018, I curated Pakistan’s first-ever pavilion in the Venice Architecture Biennale. Informed by the theme of FREESPACE, the pavilion was a spatial manifestation of the complex and contradictory realities of the many low-income settlements of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city with a population estimated at over 17 million.

I am currently co-curator of the Pakistan Pavilion in the 2025 edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale. Titled [Fr]Agile Systems, the Pavilion not only highlights the severity of Pakistan’s vulnerability to climate-induced disasters, but also serves as a reminder of the stark inequity of the climate crisis — one that keeps weighing down hardest on regions that have historically had the least to do with causing it.

Now and again, I also participate in design competitions of interest through TwentySeven70, which I like to think of as my independent design studio/practice.            

I hold a Master of Arts in Interior Architectural Design from Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart [Germany] with an exchange semester at Istanbul Teknik Üniversitesi [Türkiye], and a Bachelor of Architecture from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture [Pakistan].