Chad Connery
Assistant Professor
Chad Connery is an assistant professor at SAPL and a successful architectural designer whose work spans a wide range of design scales, from human bodies to infrastructure. He is the co-founder of the internationally recognized MOTE Projects, a speculative design practice that has received numerous awards for its innovative and materially grounded design approach. “I think that design, as a calling to work in and think about, is natural to my identity as someone who grew up in a rural context with ties to land and making... with a horticulturist mother and questions of landscape, and a carpenter father with questions of assemblies, of form, and construction.”
These values are reflected in his teaching strategies, which are deeply rooted in an appreciation for physicality and the integration of systemic and contextual thinking. Connery emphasizes a student-led approach in his teaching, focusing on the use of matter and systems as tools within architectural education to manufacture a sense of gravity in the work.
Connery advocates for a strong focus on collaboration, among both students and faculty. “Having equal agency or equal input from all of the participants of our school in the BDCI undergraduate program is something that I think is required for us to really understand and envision not just how this is going to play out, but how we collectively want this to develop.” His emphasis on process, autonomy, and flexible thinking fosters the skills that students will need to navigate an increasingly unpredictable professional landscape.
Contact Info
Education
M.Arch (University of Manitoba)
Keywords
- Contextual
- Matter
- Tooling
- Systems
- Student-led
Links