About

Justin McElderry is an architectural designer, strategist, educator, and artist working across architecture, art, and economics. He leads OJM (Office of Justin McElderry), an advisory and design practice based in Chicago that helps mission-aligned organizations shape the future of culture, place, and public life. Working with brands, institutions, and civic partners, OJM develops ambitious, early-stage ideas into tangible initiatives, experiences, and spaces.

Through collaborations with for-profit and non-profit organizations of all scales, past projects have taken the form of strategic plans, architectural propositions, new services, frameworks for systemic investment, publications, physical and digital experiences, and more. Moving fluidly between foresight, research, strategy, and design, the work is particularly interested in the relationship between (1) how compelling ideas are conceived, made, and experienced, and (2) how they might create lasting cultural, social, and economic value.

Philosophically, the practice remains grounded in the belief that architecture should be concerned not only with physical form, but with the cultural, economic, and institutional conditions that make it possible. Rather than treating these conditions as constraints imposed on design, the practice approaches them as material for multigenerational thinking and collective impact.

As a professor at IIT School of Architecture, McElderry’s research often seeks to interrogate place-based investment and sustainable business models with particular focus on the future of regional food economies, religious spaces, non-extractive retail experiences, and suburban and rural development.

Previously, McElderry has served as a visiting critic at the Knowlton School of Architecture at The Ohio State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), and his writing has been published through academic journals at Yale University and the University of Cambridge. McElderry also maintains an active artistic practice spanning sound, film, print, textile, and sculpture. These artworks function as research artifacts—ways of thinking through time, labor, memory, and value—and often operate in parallel with, or in tension against, professionalized modes of architectural production.

Past Collaborators, Partners, and Experiences

Adidas

A Ma Maniere

Birmingham Office of Economic Development

Atlanta Design Festival

Certain Measures

Chicago Architectural Biennial

Deloitte

Educated Guess

Emory Turner Environmental Law Clinic

Experimental Station

Harvard University Lab for Design Technologies