Alison Brooks

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT ALISON BROOKS

Alison Brooks, Founder and Creative Director of Alison Brooks Architects, is one of the UK’s most highly awarded and internationally acclaimed architects. A native of Ontario, she moved to London in 1988 and established her practice in 1996. With built works encompassing urban design and housing, private houses, installations, public buildings for the arts and higher education, she is the only architect to have received the profession’s three most prestigious UK building design awards: the RIBA Stirling Prize, Manser Medal (twice), and the Stephen Lawrence Prize.Her architecture fuses cultural memory with the future, to create places of gathering, learning and dwelling that resonate with meaning. Research-based and community-informed, her uniquely sculptural design language is beautifully demonstrated in her Cohen Quadrangle for Exeter College, Oxford. Recent commissions include academic buildings for the London School of Economics, the University of Toronto and Homerton College Cambridge. She is authoring two 40-storey towers in Toronto’s Quayside masterplan and a 1M sf mixed-use urban quarter in the City of Surrey, BC.Notable buildings include the Stirling-prize-winning Accordia, Cambridge, and Cadence, the arched tower marking the top of Lewis Cubitt Park. Private houses continue to serve as a focussed platform for the practice’s design research, from the much-celebrated 2001 VXO House to the 2021 RIBA House of the Year, Windward House. She has been invited to exhibit at the Venice Architecture Biennale three times.Her practice’s numerous awards include Dezeen Architect of the Year and BD Housing Architect of the Year. Alison has held teaching positions at numerous prestigious universities, including the Architectural Association, the Bartlett, Harvard GSD, ETSAM in Madrid, and more recently, Cornell AAP. She lectures internationally on architecture and urban design and serves on numerous international design competition juries. Renowned Spanish publisher TC Cuadernos recently published ‘Alison Brooks Architects: Architecture 20••••24’; their first monograph covering the work of a female architect.