TC Cuadernos 163: Alison Brooks Architects

The work of Alison Brooks Architects fuses an endlessly inventive architectural imagination with profound sensitivity to the diverse cultural and natural histories that form each project’s provenance. This ethos underpins the extraordinary array of nuanced and joyful portfolio of works illustrated in this book, collectively described by Brooks as ‘experimental archetypes’. This 386-page monograph charts eighteen built works completed in the past 20 years, extensively documented with descriptive texts, photographs, drawings and emblematic construction details that illuminate each project’s tectonic and conceptual intent.

The private houses in this book define Brooks’ early career and continue to be a test bed for experimentation. They illuminate her ability to conjure deeply human architectures of plasticity and informality. Organic geometries and expressive roof forms loosen cartesian boundaries to offer indeterminate spaces: these simultaneously act as a canvas for daily life, workplaces, or private art collections.

As the practice’s work has grown in scale, their urban housing schemes have been motivated by Brooks’ foundational belief that the architect’s duty to the city, and society, is to provide beautiful, sustainable and accessible housing for all as a framework for individual and community well-being. This book reveals residential projects characterised by spatial generosity and a uniquely sculptural approach to form and material.

Alison Brooks Architects’ more recent educational and cultural projects emphasise architecture as a celebration of time, space and light. Here Brooks interweaves spatial narratives with structural and material invention, exhibiting ever more sophisticated architectural languages and environments to engender new forms of social exchange.