ARCHITECT | DESIGNER | EDUCATOR
With a background in architectural design and a keen interest in postcolonial, decolonial, and critical urban theory, Sami Chohan is an educator whose teaching and research activities are centered on imagining spatial scenarios in direct opposition to dominant power structures and entrenched economic interests that shape and influence our built and natural environments. Wary of how strictly siloed and insular architectural education can be, his studios and seminars encourage students to move across disciplines, geographies, and cultures in search of diverse perspectives, new familiarities, and spatial solutions that speak loudly for social and environmental change.
Before joining the School of Architecture & Environment, University of Oregon, as Visiting Faculty Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice and Visiting Assistant Professor, he served as Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi where he led the undergraduate architecture program from 2015 to 2019, managed and taught architecture design thesis studios, and also taught various non-studio courses, including a graduate seminar on the impact of neoliberal policies on social and environmental fabrics of major cities across the global south.
He also serves as advisor and educator for GCAS-Jəhān, a de-centered node of the Global Center for Advanced Studies promoting transdisciplinary, collaborative and anti-colonial processes of knowing and being in the service of students, scholars and practitioners.
In 2018, he curated Pakistan’s first-ever national pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture. Following the Biennale’s thematic of FREESPACE and titled as The Fold, the pavilion was an expression of the complex and often contradictory relationships between the physical and social conditions of the many low-income settlements of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city with a population of over 16 million.
He holds a Master of Arts in Interior Architectural Design from Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart with an exchange semester at İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture.