Interview with Alison Brooks of Alison Brook Architects

Alison Brooks is a Canadian-born British architect and the founder of Alison Brooks Architects, an award-winning London-based practice recognized for its contextual, experimental, and human-centric architecture. Since establishing the firm in 1996, Brooks has developed a multidisciplinary portfolio spanning housing, cultural institutions, academic buildings, and large-scale urban regeneration projects, grounded in a belief in architecture’s civic and social responsibility.

A graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture in Canada, Alison Brooks moved to London in 1988, initially working with Ron Arad Associates before founding her studio. Her design approach synthesizes material craft, cultural narratives, and spatial innovation, producing architecture that is both socially generous and formally ambitious. Alison Brooks Architects’ work is characterized by a commitment to authenticity of materials, responsiveness to place, and a profound attention to human experience.

Under Brooks’ leadership, the practice has earned an exceptional record of accolades, including all three of the UK’s most prestigious architectural awards: the Stirling Prize, the Manser Medal, and the Stephen Lawrence Prize. Major projects such as Accordia Housing in Cambridge (as part of Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios with Alison Brooks Architects and Maccreanor Lavington), the Quarterhouse Performing Arts Centre in Folkestone, and the Smile Pavilion at the London Design Festival have solidified her international reputation. Notably, “The Smile,” a groundbreaking hardwood CLT structure designed for the American Hardwood Export Council and the London Design Festival, showcased Brooks’ capacity for technical innovation and spatial storytelling.

Alison Brooks is recognized as one of the leading voices in contemporary architecture, consistently advocating for equity, sustainability, and design excellence. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2013, awarded the AJ Woman Architect of the Year in 2013, and named among Debrett’s 500 most influential people in Britain. Her studio continues to work across a range of typologies, maintaining a design ethos that bridges public ambition with personal experience.

What inspires you?

Nature, Art, History, Words/Literature, Geology, Geometry, everything! And knowing that the world could be a much better place through architecture and imagination. I see architecture as a form of experiential communication. It should convey values, pleasure, and surprise, as well as usefulness.

What inspired you to become an architect?

At around 8 years old, I made a conscious decision to always be self-sufficient. So I decided I would eventually need a profession of some sort. Along the way, I was influenced by my mother’s devotion to history, literature, language, and all the arts. For her, the most important role of an education was to broaden one’s horizons. Architecture fulfilled that criterion. When I was 13, we moved to a new city, and I measured and drew plans of the home I was leaving behind. That was probably my first architectural act — a way of holding onto joyful childhood memories through recording space, through drawing. Later in high school, I was lucky enough to find an elective course on architectural drafting and design. I knew I’d found my calling.

How would you describe your design philosophy?

My design philosophy is rooted in context: every project is a unique expression of cultural history, ecology, and spirit of place. It is research-based, responsive. I see architecture as a way of combining memory with the future, enabling communities to identify with a place, forge healthy relationships and find beauty in everyday experience.

What is your favourite project?

My next project.

What is your favorite architectural detail?

Thresholds. That moment when you cross from one condition to another. The edge where the enclosure of a building or a space meets the world. I’ve always been fascinated by that transition—how it can be inhabited, expressed, choreographed, or made mysterious. It’s a spatial invitation, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

Do you have a favourite material?

Wood, but I prefer the word trees. Wood implies a product, where trees evoke an organic being or process. I grew up surrounded by mixed deciduous hardwood forests, so a deeply personal connection exists. Wood has this incredible duality: it’s ancient and futuristic, tactile and structural, warm yet rigorous. Its grain speaks of time, growth, flows, seasons. And it speaks to sustainability in a way that’s both poetic and practical.

How do you see CLT in architecture?

I’m interested in using timber in a way where the material itself can be read and felt. The Smile was a perfect test bed for pushing cross-laminated timber in the UK — in particular hardwood CLT — and showcase its ability to perform at many levels — structurally, geometrically, experientially — as a finish and in a sensory capacity by creating an immersive environment. I try to use materials that never have to be painted — brick, stone, concrete, trees — materials that have traditionally been highly durable, that grow a patina with time. The surface is the material.

What is your process for starting a new project?

Listening, experiencing the place, and research that includes the settlement but also the cultural artifacts, stories, and myths that are the project context. Dialogue with the communities that are invested in the project, demonstrating that we are collaborators in a shared project to unearth the project’s potential.

How do you balance function and creativity in your designs?

I don’t see a division between function and creativity. It’s all part of a process. Design thinking in terms of architectural functionality typically originates with tacit knowledge, which produces a straightforward, rational, instinctive response to constraints, for example,e scale, site, materials or budget. I then put that solution aside and tried the opposite. Then a third. I try to create openings for ideas by challenging my own assumptions and testing each idea to destruction.

How does the environment influence your work?

Profoundly. The climate crisis is probably number 1 on most architects’ agendas. Reducing carbon emissions, energy consumption, supporting biodiversity, carbon sequestration, soils, and natural reforestation. We all aspire to delivering net-zero or regenerative design, and we use computational tools to evaluate life-cycle carbon, etc. But we need to work with our clients’ objectives and budgets. One of the most significant ways to help the environment is to reduce waste, and construction is one of the biggest contributors to contaminated landfills. So I advocate for off-site manufacturing whenever feasible.

What inspired The Smile?

I wanted to make something enigmatic — something that didn’t look like a building at all but invited people to enter and explore. It offered a playful, immersive sensory experience. And it was also a structural experiment: could we build something that cantilevered 12 meters in both directions from a single fulcrum? The form itself is a public invitation to test if the pavilion will rock. Framed views at each end of the arc invited visitors to walk further up the slope or run down. Children loved it. It is still possibly the most complex CLT structure yet built.

What advice would you give to young architects?

Be a good listener. Be fearless. Try not to repeat yourself. Honour your typological ancestors. Discover what is meaningful to your clients and your communities; at the same time, hold on to your ideals, your memories, and instincts. Take a stand and bring your art into the service of public life.