1.5 ConEd Learning Hours

2:00 p.m. ‐ 3:30 p.m.

Urban housing frames the space of our civic commons. It gives both form and identity to our streets and neighbourhoods, and, at the same time, “home” provides the physical and cognitive framework through which we experience the world. Housing architecture therefore embodies a critically important relationship between the individual and the collective, the household and society. In the context of the combined climate and biodiversity crises, urban housing as civic infrastructure must also play a significant role in transforming the relationship of architecture to nature. The way we conceive, design, and construct housing must start to serve nature, not only humans.

For 25 years, Alison Brooks Architects London has made housing design a pillar of our practice: to restore its civic role as a generous, resilient frame for public and private life. We see housing as mixed-use places for productivity and work, and as places of resilience and adaptability over time. In this talk, Alison Brooks will outline the urban design policies, frameworks, and quality standards that support inclusive and resilient housing in the United Kingdom, and her context-inspired design strategies that have underpinned her work in the U.K. and internationally. These include recently completed mid-rise, net-zero university housing schemes in Oxford and Cambridge; her newly completed arched tower ‘Cadence’ in King’s Cross, constructed using 100% off-site manufacturing; and her competition-winning design for the Western Curve, her practice’s tallest building to date—a 69-storey waterfront tower and education space designed to re-establish local ecologies in Toronto’s emerging Quayside masterplan.

Learning Objectives
1. Understand the contexts in which good housing design can be enabled: through urban governance and stewardship, masterplan frameworks, and mini- competitions. 
2.  Gain understanding of mid-rise, family-friendly housing typologies, such as the London Mansion block, and how these support community-building.
3.  Understand off-site fabrication and design for manufacturing and assembly in housing design as a means to reduce time, cost, waste, and carbon.
4.  Learn about the project ethos and design initiatives being explored at Toronto Quayside to embed social diversity, neighbourhood culture, and responses the climate and biodiversity crises.

Alison Brooks, Founder and Creative Director
Alison Brooks Architects

Alison Brooks, founder and creative director of Alison Brooks Architects, is one of the United Kingdom’s most highly awarded and internationally acclaimed architects. A native of Guelph, Ontario, she studied architecture at the University of Waterloo before moving to the UK in 1988. Since founding her practice in 1996, she has emerged as one of the UK's most inventive architects with works encompassing urban design and housing, higher-education buildings, private houses, and public buildings for the arts. In addition to receiving more than 80 awards for design achievement, she is the only UK architect to have received all three of the profession's most prestigious architectural awards: the RIBA Stirling Prize, the Manser Medal (twice), and the Stephen Lawrence Prize.

Alison's unique architectural approach springs from invested research into specific geographies, climate, and cultures of each project so that her design solutions emerge as both unique and relevant to the constituencies they serve. This is beautifully exemplified by her recently completed Cohen Quadrangle at Exeter College, Oxford. The first Oxford College to be designed by a female architect, this building demonstrates the conceptual rigour, sculptural quality, and ingenious detailing that is her practice trademark. Current large-scale urban projects in Canada include a 60-storey tower in Toronto’s Quayside development, and a 1M-sf mixed-use urban quarter in Surrey, B.C.

In 2020, she was awarded Dezeen Architect of the Year and BD Housing Architect of the Year. Alison has held numerous teaching positions, 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.