On July 4, 2024, Alison Brooks and Rasmus Astrup of SLA teamed up for a keynote presentation at the Festival of Place in Boxpark Wembley. The duo showcased three innovative Toronto projects that reimagine the city’s post-industrial waterfront and brutalist legacies.

Their presentation, centred around the theme “Transforming Urban Landscapes,” highlighted the integration of natural elements into the regeneration of Toronto in Canada. Christine Murray, Editor-in-Chief and Director of The Developer and Festival of Place, chaired the double-act.

Alison Brooks and Rasmus Astrup showcased three innovative Toronto projects that reimagine the city’s post-industrial waterfront and brutalist legacies:

1. Waterfront Toronto – A bold vision for sustainable urban development featuring an ensemble of mid- and high-rise buildings stitched together by a community forest.
2. Bissell Building, University of Toronto – A revitalization of the Brutalist Claude T. Bissell Building, home to the Faculty of Information in downtown Toronto.
3. David Crombie Park – A revitalization of a historic 1970s landscape designed to meet the needs of the local urban community.

Their keynote emphasized sustainability, community, and the seamless blend of architecture with natural surroundings, offering valuable insights into the future of urban design and the potential for nature to reshape our cities.

You can watch their conversation here.

This June, Alison Brooks alongside Carlos Chauca Galicia, led a studio in the Master of Advanced Studies in Collective Housing – a collaborative postgraduate program for qualified architects offered by Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and ETH Zürich.

This program focuses on housing, city, and energy studies, combining practice-oriented design synthesis with integrated disciplines and theoretical issues of dwelling and housing.

In Praise of Shadows: Towers of Madrid Nuevo Norte

In the workshop, the task is to re-imagine the residential tower so that it is liveable, generous, and welcoming of shade and darkness and attuned to the climate of Madrid. The seven tower schemes will evolve the qualities of the city’s finest ‘street architecture’ to find new form and expression, giving darkness and light equal consideration.

Using the text “In Praise of Shadows” by Japanese writer Junichiro Tanizaki, the workshop also addressed the increasing reliance on tower typologies in urban development to fund economic models in Europe’s metropolitan centres. High-density residential developments reflect the costs associated with land purchase, decontamination, infrastructure installation, and the funding of social, economic, cultural, and ecological infrastructure in new neighbourhoods. Tall buildings are thus a prerequisite for new metropolitan neighbourhoods. This principle is evident in the planned regeneration of Madrid Nuevo Norte, where the central urban gesture – a new park over the rail lands – is lined with tall buildings.

Site:

The Madrid Nuevo Norte project, also known as the Chamartín project, aims to transform the northern part of Madrid into a modern, sustainable, and connected district. Covering approximately 2.3 million square meters (3.3 million including the railway tracks), it stands as one of the largest urban regeneration initiatives in Europe.

The development encompasses a new financial district along with extensive residential, commercial, and green areas. It will feature 1 million square meters of residential space, including 10,500 new housing units, 20% of which will be affordable. Additionally, there will be 1.6 million square meters of office space and 400,000 square meters dedicated to green spaces and parks.

MCH Students:

Anwar Abbassi, Kailey Akins, Derrick Christensen, Thomas Christensen, Edgardo Cruz, Viktoriia Denisova, Jose Eduardo Delgado, Julio Ferré, Pedro Gaxiola, Rafailia Mandi, Eduardo Maldonado, Karla Madrigal, Diego Martínez, Ximena Real, Elizaveta Nikolskaia, Ayush Patel, Betul Sahin, Kunal Sonawane, Sofia de Luca, Milagros Ucha, Antoine Voruz, Mariam Yasser.

Alison Brooks will be speaking at the Ontario Association of Architects Conference on Thursday the 23rd of May. Her speech is entitled: “Social Equity and Future Heritage: Housing as Civic Building.”

Urban housing frames the space of our civic commons. It gives both form and identity to our streets and neighborhoods, 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 biodiversity crisis, 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.

Pictured, The Western Curve, our practice’s tallest building to date—a 69-storey tower and education space at Waterfront Toronto is designed to re-establish local ecologies in Toronto’s emerging Dream & Great Gulf Quayside masterplan.

Alison Brooks to speak at OAA Conference in Niagara Falls Thu, 05.23.24 , 14:00

Niagara Falls Convention Centre, ON

Niagara Falls Convention Centre, ON

When

23.05.2024 14:00

Where

Niagara Falls Convention Centre, ON

Website

oaa.on.ca

British-Canadian architect Alison Brooks delivered the closing keynote on April 24, 2024, at the AIBC (Architectural Institute of British Columbia) Conference, held in-person at the Vancouver Convention Centre West.

In her keynote, “Context is Everything,” Alison Brooks, founder of Alison Brooks Architects in London, explored themes such as civicness as a condition of reciprocity, the creation of future contexts, infrastructure for the arts, embracing new global narratives, and identity and inclusion.

Her talk closed the AIBC Conference 2024 in Vancouver, which featured nearly 30 sessions over two days. The conference theme, “Act,” highlighted the pivotal role of architects in the built environment, exploring technical actions, the art and science of architecture, and the impact of architectural professionals on their communities.