Connor is a technologically adept young design professional who believes that the most valuable conceptualization tools considerably predate computers. “Today you can just press play and things happen,” he says. “The risk is that architecture becomes a program of replicated design, rather than the critically thought-out process each site and program deserves.” He sees value in thinking about structure as a set of particular parts, connected in particular ways. His own experience encompasses traditional and high-tech digital design approaches: after refining his manual model-making skills during a Tokyo internship at Chiba Manabu Architects, he served as a teaching assistant at Carleton University’s Sensory Architecture and Liminal Technologies Laboratory. Connor’s affinity for landscape and desire to understand a site’s essence prompted his master’s thesis subject at Carleton’s Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism: a close site analysis of his family’s Madawaska Valley property, explaining how each of the 500 trees within the footprint he catalogued constituted a distinct micro-site of habitable space. His PLANT projects range from Toronto Community Housing Coropration townhouse retrofits to collaborating with the studio’s landscape architecture team on the landscape for Toronto Metropolitan University’s Science Building.