Eric Nay

Dr. Eric Nay is an Associate Professor at OCAD University and permanent faculty member in the Department of Geography and Environment at Mount Allison University in the Canadian Maritimes and teaches history and theory of architecture courses at the graduate level at the University of Toronto, Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design when requested. Eric holds degrees from the University of Kentucky (B.Arch), Cornell University (M.Arch), and the University of Toronto (PhD), and was a Judge Kenneth Brille Scholar at the Hamline University School of Law and studied German translation at the New School for Social Research in Manhattan, Arabic at Portland State University, alongside many other adventures that have allowed him to work with people from Estonia to Syria and beyond.

He has practiced architecture and design in New York City, Chicago, and California including working with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill as a designer in their Chicago office, as well as with Architects that include José Oubrerie (Le Corbusier protégé and Dean) and Paul Muller (Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown's office) and many others.

Eric's teaching experience includes teaching architectural history and theory, environmental design studios and courses in human geography and design culture. He has taught for nearly three decades at more than a dozen universities, colleges and cultural institutions across Asia, the Middle East, the UK and the Americas, including the Irish Architecture Foundation (Dublin), the University of California at Davis (US), the American University of Sharjah (UAE), King Mongkut’s University (Bangkok, Thailand) and Cornell University (US).

Nay’s research is interdisciplinary, focusing on modern architecture as cultural heritage, decolonization, and the intersections of sustainability, globalization, and social justice. His work also explores geopolitics, spatial justice, and heritage frameworks such as UNESCO World Heritage, alongside critical studies of figures like Le Corbusier, contributing to postcolonial discourse in contemporary architecture and design. He has published more than thirty peer-reviewed articles, delivered more than forty conference papers, authored multiple book chapters, and has participated in editing two books, in addition to producing numerous publications that include SPOOL (Netherlands); ARQ (Chile); ICOMOS (Germany); docomomo (US); The Humanities and Technology Review (US); INTBAU (Italy); Open House International (UK); The Journal of the Constructed Environment (Canada); Alternatives Journal (Canada) and Folk, Knowledge, Place (China).

His scholarship continues to contribute to architectural theory, critical heritage studies, and contemporary debates on conservation, pedagogy, and global design practice. Current projects include critical geography spatial sovereignty in the Arctic (The PLAN Journal, Bologna, Italy – forthcoming 2026); Dark Matter: Revisiting the Architecture of Coal in Post-War Europe ACME (Architecture of Coal in Modern Europe) - a book project funded by an ERC Advanced Grant, 2024–2030; and “Moroccan Modernism and Post-colonial Imaginaries: Forms of Resistance & Architectural Transformation,” a sabbatical project just beginning based on a multi-tiered investigation that includes architectural analysis and documentation of key buildings in Agadir, Morocco, as well as interviews and teaching opportunities in Morocco, all framed by critical design pedagogy and decolonization.

“Moroccan Modernism and Post-colonial Imaginaries: Forms of Resistance; Architectural Transformation, is a multi-tiered investigation that includes architectural analysis and documentation of key buildings, as well as interviews and teaching opportunities in Morocco, framed very specifically by my own work in critical design pedagogy and decolonization, but more specifically is uniquely focused on revisiting Jean Lois Cohen’s and Monique Eleb’s, Casablanca: Colonial Myths and Architectural Ventures as both an architectural archive and as an ideological frame for how architecture and post-colonialism have evolved in Northern Africa over the past two decades. Cohen’s work, this text and much more, offered a unique and timely multi-tiered socio-spatial comparative analyses of French colonial influence and emergent attitudes as witnessed in the built environment. This argument and his archive of buildings, spaces, urban plans and archival data will be revisited and expanded upon with attention paid to emergent local voices and building traditions as a form of post-colonial resistance to the “spectral presence “of French occupation.” (Nay 2025)