[10] Brooks was born and lived her early years in Welland, Canada, but moved city in Ontario to Guelph where she attended John F Ross high school.
[16] Alison Brooks Architects’ Sky Villas and Brass Building in the 2008 Stirling Prize-winning Accordia, Cambridge masterplan[17] paved the way for work in housing.
Notable projects include the Stirling Prize-shortlisted Newhall Be[18] Albert Crescent in Bath,[19] and the 2018 Mies Van Der Rohe Award finalist Ely Court in London.
[20] Residential projects currently under construction include Cadence Kings Cross and One Ashley Road in London, as well as Rubicon and Knight's Park in Cambridge.
[24] Exeter College, Oxford’s 6000 square metre Cohen Quadrangle also featured an innovative cladding and opened its doors to students in 2017, winning multiple awards for education building design.
[25][26] Rowan Moore, The Guardian’s architecture critic, described the new Quad as, ‘A tour de force that puts people first.’[27] Design for the new entrance building and porters lodge of Homerton College, Cambridge is in its final stages.
[28] Alison Brooks Architects was shortlisted, from close to 200 international expressions of interest, to redevelop the London School of Economics’ 43 Lincolns Inn Fields into the new Firoz Lalji Global Hub.
[29] ‘The Smile’ was a Project for the 2016 London Design Festival; a public pavilion in the Chelsea College of Art (UAL) Parade ground that showcased the structural and spatial potential of cross–laminated hardwood using American tulipwood.
ARUP Engineer Andrew Lawrence described The Smile as, ‘The most complex CLT structure that has ever been built.’[30] For Brooks, it was the opportunity the stretch the new ‘wonder material’ to the limit whilst demonstrating that the 21st century is an era not of concrete, but of timber.