Alison Brooks OBE is an internationally acclaimed architect whose work combines cultural research, sculptural invention and a conviction in architecture’s civic purpose. Born in Ontario, Canada, she founded Alison Brooks Architects in London in 1996. Across three decades, her work has expanded from experimental houses to housing and urban design, universities, cultural buildings and city-scale projects, establishing a distinctive architectural language grounded in place, culture and civic life.

Brooks’ architectural imagination was formed between two worlds. Growing up in southern Ontario, she experienced the Canadian landscape as something ancient, elemental and alive: the exposed geology of the Canadian Shield, hardwood forests emerging from rock, and the lakes and islands to which she has returned throughout her life. At the same time, her mother introduced her to the cultural richness of historic architecture, furniture, literature and art. Toronto offered another counterpoint: the optimism of 1960’s modernism. This dialogue between nature and city, history and futurism, craft and invention became fundamental to her work.At the University of Waterloo, Brooks studied architecture within a programme that placed cultural history alongside design. A formative period in Rome intensified her fascination with permanence, geometry and material, particularly through the spatial complexity of Hadrian’s Villa and the enduring civic structures of European cities. Architecture revealed itself as a cultural artefact: capable of carrying memory across generations while accommodating new forms of life.

“I believe that the ancient forms and formats of architecture — archetypes — that everybody understands and recognises, can be transformed and translated into something new.”

After graduating, Brooks moved to London in 1988 and subsequently became a director of the experimental studio Ron Arad Associates, spending seven years working across architecture, furniture, interiors and art. Establishing her own practice opened a new period of invention. Early projects became architectural essays exploring folding, carving, geometry and material continuity. Private houses led to housing; housing expanded her focus from the individual building to streets, neighbourhoods and the city. In 2017, marking 21 years of Alison Brooks Architects, she published Ideals then Ideas, articulating the principles that had emerged through her work. Rather than beginning with the pressure to invent an architectural concept, Brooks proposed that ideas acquire meaning when grounded in an ethical position.

“It is empowering to stand behind the ideas if they are underpinned by your personal ideals.”

Through built work, writing, teaching and lectures, Brooks has consistently advocated for architecture as an authored cultural practice and for housing as one of architecture’s most consequential civic forms. This philosophy has generated an architecture deliberately resistant to repetition. From the Stirling Prize-winning Accordia and the Cohen Quadrangle at Oxford to The Smile and Cadence at King’s Cross, Brooks’ work moves between scales and typologies while continually searching for new architectural languages.

“I always feel like there is a discovery to be made in the next project. I’ve got to make that discovery, I can’t repeat myself. It’s an exciting way to approach projects.”

Her work and that of the practice have been widely published and received more than 100 awards internationally, including Dezeen Architect of the Year and the Architizer A+ Award for Best Medium Firm. She is a Royal Designer for Industry and has taught and lectured internationally, including at the Architectural Association, Harvard GSD, Cornell AAP and ETSAM Madrid. In 2026 Alison was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for her services to architecture. Today her thinking increasingly explores an architecture of relationships: between people and place, memory and future, human culture and the natural world. For Brooks, authorship is not an assertion of ego but an acceptance of responsibility for the values architecture makes physical.

“The architects duty is to take a stand and bring your art into the service of public life.”