For the third in RIBA South West’s current series of People, Place, Planet events, co-chairs of RIBA Somerset Mark Raby and Tom Gascoyne welcomed Alison Brooks of Alison Brooks Architects, whose work has garnered countless awards including the Stephen Lawrence Prize and the Stirling Prize. With the realisation of an eagerly anticipated new Maggie’s Centre in Taunton designed by her practice recently thrown into doubt, the audience were especially keen to find out more.
Gracing our shores since 1988 and producing contextually sensitive, understated and beautiful buildings through her eponymous practice since 1996, Canadian-born Alison Brooks presented recent projects under the unifying theme of ‘dwelling’.
She intends the word in its widest possible sense to mean the act of inhabiting any space for any reason. To be successful, it must confer human wellbeing balanced responsibly with nature and fitting harmoniously into the cultural memory of place.
Within that overall model, her method is to focus on archetypes – architectural forms that endure because they are treasured, valued, and loved – as starting points for generating new forms.
Her respect for this defining adaptive resilience was instilled while growing up in Welland, Ontario, when its early twentieth-century vertical bridge was consigned to history by a newer, taller but culturally dead road bridge. Resonating to Gertrude Stein’s famous lament about the loss of built heritage, “There is no there, there”, Brooks set off for London in search of places with ‘history, quality and identity’, which she found in abundance.
Seeking inspiration in archetypes is not new. The magic, and what marks Brooks out as one of the pre-eminent architects of our day, is the way that she distils their DNA and redeploys it for contemporary needs and, indeed, construction methods.
At Ely Court, her practice healed a patch of postwar ‘failed utopia’ by restoring the Victorian urban grain with new terraced housing, a design whose evolution can be traced back through earlier projects, including Accordia in Cambridge. With comparatively high ceilings, many cores, dual-aspects, sheltered inset balconies, and a graduated shift from public to private realm, the scheme delivered 43 homes, 40% of which were affordable.
At Windward House, shortlisted for the RIBA South West Awards 2020/21, we have an atrium house. The clients wanted to remodel and extend a Victorian farmhouse to accommodate them, their extended family, and their collection of African tribal artworks. In deliberate counterpoint to the farmhouse, the new extension is low and wrapped in dark cladding, the better to disappear from view to satisfy planning constraints. Inside, its generous central atrium-cum-dining area is anything but dark, the asymmetrical plan and elevation framing magnificent views out and big windows letting light in.
Exeter College’s new Cohen Quadrangle building reinvents Oxford’s quadrangle archetype to fit on a long, narrow site in Jericho. Retaining an Edwardian façade at its eastern end, the new building’s parti is what Brooks describes as an ‘S-shaped quadrangle’ pierced lengthways by two glazed ellipsoidal cloisters that meet in a central social learning space. The packed programme is cleverly enclosed under a curving roof of stippled stainless steel shingles that eschew convention by flowing onto the façade with all the craftsmanship beloved by William Morris, one of Exeter College’s alumni.
The pentagonal S5 plot on the northern tip of Argent’s King’s Cross redevelopment will accommodate a tower – 158 homes above, mixed-use below – that Brooks describes as ‘a courtyard building, densified to make it viable’. Taking its cues from St Pancras’s arches and the language of bricks that characterises the area’s industrial heritage, her practice is working closely with Laing O’Rourke to manufacture brickwork panels offsite for a quicker build, less wastage, fewer deliveries to site, and safer working.
Her whistle-stop tour came to an end with the Maggie’s Centre attached to Musgrove Park hospital in Taunton. Designed as a fresh take on the pavilion building in response to its location overlooking a park, the scheme has recently been stopped because of local opposition. Conceived as a timber building, the two-storey design comprised a central atrium and cooking space, with therapy and admin rooms branching off in four wings, all topped by concave roofs and set in a landscape of native species.
Saddened but not disheartened that the project is currently stymied, Brooks said that the best way to support the scheme was to support Maggie’s cancer charity for the incredible work they do. Indeed, their guiding principle – to create, in Founder Charles Jencks’ words, the ‘architecture of hope’– is one that should suffuse all that architects do.
Words by Matt Thompson
