Building Her Ideals: Alison Brooks on Expressing Identity, Forming Relationships, and an Architect's Duty
Portrait by Dan Wilton.
By Julia Gamolina
Alison Brooks is one of the UK’s most highly awarded and internationally acclaimed architects. A native of Ontario, she studied architecture at the University of Waterloo before moving to London in 1988. Since founding her practice in 1996 she has produced works encompassing urban design and housing, higher education buildings, private houses and public buildings for the arts. Her practice’s achievements include the RIBA Stirling Prize, RIBA House of the Year and Dezeen Architect of the Year. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Alison Brooks talks about self-sufficiency, creativity, and professionalism, advising those just starting their careers to make time for creative thinking.
JG: Let’s start from the very beginning – tell me about how and where you grew up and what you liked to do.
AB: I grew up in a small city called Welland in Southern Ontario. I had two older sisters and after my parents split up when I was eight, I was raised by my mother. Welland was an interesting place in that it was small and safe enough that I was free to roam – with my friends, on bikes, to the parks, up and down the Welland Canal. We’d actually try to get lost, and fail. We would cycle to the beach at Lake Erie, to St. Catherine’s – in retrospect it was empowering, to be let free into the landscape [laughs]. I was also an avid reader and a tomboy. I liked to take risks - in Grade 7 I was expelled for a day for smoking in the schoolground.
At the same time, I think I was heavily influenced by my mother’s interest in historic architecture – farmhouses, Victorian and Neo-Georgian, beautiful barns in the countryside. She was a nature enthusiast and an antiques enthusiast, and so she opened my eyes to the enjoyment of architecture and landscapes, and the artfulness that went into their making. That was coupled with frequent trips to Toronto, visiting places like the University of Toronto where both parents studied, and which is a beautiful North American Collegiate Gothic campus. It’s a kind of academic paradise in the city centre.
I grew up in Toronto actually! Well, from age eight to fourteen.
It’s interesting how our youth is in chunks, isn’t it [laughs]. In my high school years, at age 13, we moved from Welland to Guelph, which was a profound shift in terms of an urban experience. Guelph is a university city that was founded around 1820, with a very intentional urban design influenced by Christopher Wren, built by Scottish stonemasons. In contrast, I spent all my summers at a cottage on an island on Georgian Bay, immersed in the wilderness. That primordial landscape, the Pre-cambrian Shield, is still my constant. It was the basis for one of my installations at the 2018 Venice Biennale Assembly of the Future, The Umbrella Islands.
An aerial image of Exeter College Oxford’s Cohen Quad.
The entrance hall and cloister of the Cohen Quad.
I’ve experienced those cottage summers too. From there, how did you get to architecture?
The shift from living in Welland and then living in Guelph raised my awareness of architecture in the sense that I was leaving the place where I’d grown up but most importantly, the house that I’d really loved. I took it upon myself to measure every room and draw plans of it before I moved, so you could say I had a bit of an instinct for this line of work! Then when I was sixteen, I took an architecture design and drafting course at my high school. I felt like a door had opened to an ideal world of self-sufficiency, creativity and professionalism. From that point I knew that architecture was my calling.
I ended up choosing the University of Waterloo, rather than Toronto, because at the time I was told it was a great program and the best in Canada. It combined the co-op system of education, a fourth year Rome studio and a focus on cultural history. We studied the history of ideas through literature, film, and art as opposed to the history of architecture. The intention was for students to understand architecture as part of a lexicon of art forms that describe the course of human civilization. I also loved the expertise offered by the co-op system; working in practices every other term. We had a very comprehensive education at Waterloo.
When did you eventually come to London?
During my studies I worked in many Canadian practices and so at the end of 6 ½ years, I felt I needed to break free from my Canadian roots, go somewhere where nobody knew me. I wanted to free myself from my past [laughs], and see what I could do. I came to London with my portfolio, my suitcase, and £500, and I never went back.
“What do you really believe in? Not what you’ve read, not what the latest thing you’ve seen in publications, but what can you bring to your work from your personal experiences from youth, places you know, your education, your politics, and life in general...Bring that to your work because nobody else will have that; that will be yours and yours alone.”
Why London?
Technically, because of the Commonwealth visa. You could go with a working holiday visa that gave you two years to work without an official work permit. Professionally, or architecturally, because of my sense of connection to the UK’s architectural culture, to the AA and its stellar graduates, and to the many architects I respected who were based in London. I wanted to work in a place that embodied history, but at the same time supported the vanguard of architectural and cultural thinking. I wanted be part of Europe. Sadly this has been removed with Brexit! But I’m still able to get on the Eurostar and be in Paris in two hours.
That is so nice. Tell me how you eventually started your own practice.
When I first got to London, in January 1988, I had a list. I was determined to work for Matthias Sauerbruch, or Peter Wilson, or Peter Cook, or Will Alsop, but because of the recession literally all of them were either shrinking or moving their studios to Germany. No one was staying in London. But Matthias had me in for tea amidst all of their packing boxes and told me that Ron Arad was working on a competition and he might need help.
I was going to take any lead I could get! So, I set up an interview, turned up, showed my portfolio to Ron and others working on the competition, saw what they were doing, and thought, “Ok, I can do this.” I joined Ron, and that led to a seven-year design partnership. I founded Ron Arad Associates with him. We completed the Tel Aviv Opera Interior Architecture (the ‘Island’), two Belgo restaurants in London, our Studio-Workshop in Chalk Farm and some residential projects. It was primarily interior work but really experimental in form, material and geometry. Eventually I realized I needed to leave if I was going to be heard or seen as an independent design voice. I wanted to work on public projects and in housing, to bring great design to communities who don’t normally have access to it.
I started Alison Brooks Architects in June of 1996, when my first child was nine months old. That was tricky timing [laughs], but even when I had my son Dylan, I only took three months off and went back to work full time with Ron. I didn’t really do maternity leave. So when I started on my own, I had childcare in place, and started the firm out of our back bedroom, doing competitions. My marketing strategy was to write two letters. Incredibly, one letter resulted in a commission for a project. A German developer I’d met in Hamburg during my RAA days asked if I’d like to design the interior to his Spa Hotel in Helgoland, an island in the North Sea. That project became an amazing kickstart to my practice; I bought my first computers, hired young German-speaking graduates and had this multicultural gang hanging out in my living room for two and a half years or so doing that project. When the project was completed, it won many hotel design awards and was published widely. That’s how everything started.
The Smile was a landmark pavilion that explored the structural potential of cross laminated hardwood.
Windward House, RIBA House of the Year 2021.
How did things evolve from there?
I did several competitions in the UK and in Europe, primarily in housing; Europan, House of the Future, Urban Splash. I wanted to break into housing, because of its huge social impact as much as its urban and architectural potential. It was also my final thesis subject at Waterloo. I’d always felt it was the architect’s duty to work in housing.
But doing open international competitions is really not a way to get a business up and running [laughs], but luckily just as my finances were drying up, and I was about to have my second child, I was then contacted by the second person I wrote a letter to, who had a house in Hampstead, and that became the VXO house. The first phone call was, “Can you design some shelves for my study,” which then ended up becoming three buildings including a renovation, a landscape, interiors: a domestic campus. I used this project to try to push the modernist idiom to its limit. Each element of the project is expressed as a sculptural, autonomous object, transparency to blur the boundary between inside and outside, integrating a site-specific artwork. That project was published all over the world for many years and was the entry to many subsequent projects, from housing to houses to masterplanning. I suppose it’s a traditional way for architects to start a practice, by doing a really good house. Once you’ve proved you can design and complete a house for a demanding private client, you can pretty much design anything [laughs].
A double question for you – in your years of running this practice, and this business, what have you learned and what advice would you give to young architects in terms of finding their design approach and identity, and then also in terms of running a business?
In terms of establishing your identity as an architect, you first need to believe in your ideals. What do you really believe in? Not what you’ve just read, not the latest thing you’ve seen in publications, but what can you bring to your work from your life experience, from youth, places you have known, your politics? What underpins your way of thinking about the world? Bring those values to your work, because nobody else will have that; they will be yours and yours alone. Ideals are the seeds of invention.
For example, what I felt in coming to Europe was a yearning for a place that valued history, and nurtured cultural expression through design and craftsmanship, education and discourse. The influence of my mother, obsessed with history, and literature, and art informed this. How could I bring the lessons of history into contemporary expression, how could I help fix the damaged done to city neighbourhoods and urban communities by misguided urban renewal? Those were the ideals I brought to my practice.
I suppose I was also on a mission to subvert Modernism. I had a Modernist’s design education - Waterloo was part of the ‘resistance’ to post-modern classicism in North America. And although those lessons were necessary, I felt that that design theory and narrative was still overly dominated by the male “heroes” of the twentieth century – Mies and Corb and Frank Lloyd Wright and the whole gang –right up until the present. felt I needed to free myself from that dogma, from tyrannical design ideologies. I needed to find other source material, more diverse cultural references. That was a challenge I personally set for myself as an architect. So when I approach a project, context is everything; its about understanding the culture of a place, a community and its values, and through that research, finding new form, expression and identity.
“...for younger architects, reaching out to more established architects, strengthening those bonds, and thinking of ways to collaborate together, is important.”
You can imagine that I really admire that. And then in terms of running a business?
The question is a good one, because I started my practice in a different galaxy [laughs]. The galaxy before the computer, and before social media, in particular. The first thing I did when I started my practice was just buy a computer, a big PowerMac. We all had to learn how to use it, that’s how fresh that all was.
Now when you start a practice, it’s a different world. You have an incredible platform, which is your website, or Instagram, and you’re not relying on people finding you in the Yellow Pages. A lot of it is about your network. I would strongly advise reaching out and forming constructive relationships with your architectural colleagues. When I started on my own, I was literally in the wilderness. I was in a foreign country, with no family, no schoolmates or fellow graduates, and I was really out on a limb. I should have made more effort to create a local networks of advice, support, and sharing. Our profession used to be really bad at knowledge-sharing and mentoring. Established firms today are more open to including younger and more diverse voices in collaborations. Thanks to the BLM movement and the equity crisis, inclusion is now a cultural mission across commissioning bodies in the UK - when you bid for a project, you need to bring a smaller practice along with you, which is great.
That’s wonderful.
I didn’t have that opportunity until the VXO house was finished and I was invited by FieldenCleggBradley Studios to join their team for Accordia, a large scale housing scheme in Cambridge. This won the Stirling Prize and cemented my reputation as a housing designer. So I think for younger architects, reaching out to more established architects, strengthening those bonds, and thinking of ways to collaborate together, is important.
Another thing I should have probably done in the early years was take out a bank loan to invest in the practice, and its infrastructure– equipment, advertising. I was very much in the old school mentality of surviving hand to mouth, relying on those monthly (always late) invoices to pay my staff, and that was really, really hard. If I’d known it was OK to take out a business loan it might have enabled me to reach more clients, invest in better equipment, and service projects better. We’re entrepreneurs, but we don’t think of ourselves like that. Business startup training is something most architects should do. It’s something our institutions should offer, like the RIBA. They now stage workshops advising on successful RFQs, but if you’re truly starting from nothing, there isn’t a lot of business guidance out there on how to make it all work.
The main entrance to Cadence, King’s Cross.
The Western Curve Tower of the Toronto Quayside development.
That’s the feedback I hear the most; everybody says they wish they had some sort of business training. Literally almost everybody.
Building on this, what would you say some of the biggest challenges have been for you in your career? And where are you in your career today?
One of the toughest things about working in the UK is that every project is a competition. There is practically no such thing as a direct commission in terms of someone calling you and saying, “I’d like you to work on this with me.” That never happens. You have to keep your radar alert to competitions and RFPs, and that’s just a really tough way to win work. You invest so much in winning the commission.
The good thing about competitions is they enable you to expand your knowledge base (R&D) to pursue different sectors and they focus your design approach. The best work that you’ll do is probably in a competition, because in that context you’re given a certain license to create something intellectually coherent and precise. If you win, it means your scheme has survived an intense process of critical assessment, from your own, the client’s and juror’s perspectives. Your next job is to defend the integrity of the competition scheme through the planning process, then build it! The UK planning process tests your work through even more lenses – its ability to preserve and enhance its (heritage) context, demonstrate public benefit, reduce Embodied and Life Cycle Carbon, increase biodiversity, all of it. This critical process is why European cities retain their quality; the public and civic institutions care about it deeply.
Who are you admiring right now?
The American artist exhibiting at the Venice Biennale this year, Simone Leigh. She’s doing the most incredible work as a sculptor and artist. Her work represents this innate power of the female figure and the historic image of the Black woman. She’s bringing a fresh and powerful sense of that identity and presence.
I’m also admiring Colin Ellard, neuroscientist and author of “Places of the Heart: The Psychogeography of Everyday Life.” In this book, he explains why humans react to places the way we do, and why we associate memory with places, and the feelings they generate. He explains the human experience of beauty, and why certain environments are universally considered beautiful. He correlates these to the hardwiring of our primordial brains in terms of what makes us feel safe. For example, why we have an affinity for environments with infinite complexity, like fractal patterns, tree canopies, or sun reflecting off the waves, and how our brains respond to this complexity, making our stress hormones lower. His book is a brilliant explanation of the environmental and design phenomena and their impact on well-being that architects and designers have been trying to defend for decades.
“We need more women creating the built environment, creating the cities in which we live. We need to inspire more young girls and women to be the makers of our world. Architecture is a cultural space - a profession, a discipline, and an art - that they can rightfully claim.”
Finally, what advice do you have for those who are just starting their careers?
Keep focused on that which you enjoy doing, as a creative person and thinker. Today one of the biggest issues is the distraction of social media. All those platforms demand your time and attention so you become either a watcher or you’re feeding that always-hungry machine. Things like drawing, using your hands, feeling that direct mind to hand connection…that’s when I feel the most joy as an architect, when I’m literally sitting down with a pen and tracing paper.
Writing is also very important, in the sense of having to distill your design ideas and articulate them clearly. Every bid will require a position statement and every design, a thesis statement. So honing those skills is essential. Teaching is another important way of focusing your interests and design research. I should mention I’m looking forward to teaching at Cornell this spring, I know you went to Cornell.
I am envious, I wish I had you as my professor!
[Laughs] That is so nice. I’ve also taught at Harvard and the AA, and I currently run a Master in Collective Housing Workshop at ETSAM (Madrid). Overall the discipline of teaching is very important. But if you want to practice as an architect, you shouldn’t devote more than twenty percent of your time to teaching. The years that I taught a full year design studio, my practice suffered. I know at architecture schools here in the UK many tutors aren’t in practice. I think that is kind of tragic that architects are being taught by architects who don’t build or run a practice, which is why there is that huge gap in our professional training.
So, on the one hand, teaching and writing is paramount, but on the other hand, it needs to be looked at as supporting your work as a practitioner, especially if you want to build. Especially if you’re female. We need more women creating the built environment, creating the cities in which we live. We need to inspire more young girls and women to be the makers of our world. Architecture is a cultural space - a profession, a discipline, and an art - that they can rightfully claim.
I couldn’t agree more. Thank you Alison.