GAD Editorial · Published · · English study · Chinese summary · Study dated 2026-10-06
Curved roofs and sculptural silhouettes give Alison Brooks Architects' work an immediate identity. Their more consequential role emerges when those forms organise an approach, frame a view or distinguish a shared room. Founded in London by Alison Brooks in 1996, the practice links architectural expression with cultural research. Cohen Quad in Oxford and the temporary Smile pavilion in London show how that ambition operates at very different scales and durations.
Cohen Quad expands Exeter College through a building in which living, learning and meeting are closely connected. It opened to students in January 2017. The plan bends into an elongated S, producing two courtyards with different orientations. Cloisters connect teaching spaces and gathering areas, while student accommodation rises above the lower collective levels. This arrangement translates the collegiate courtyard into a sequence rather than a single enclosed centre. A person can move between outdoor spaces while encountering several kinds of indoor activity along the way.
The Learning Commons is central to this interpretation. Informal study needs more choices than a corridor with seating added to it: some people want visibility and company, while others need a protected edge. The building's connected levels and places to pause allow a range of relationships to the larger group. Its combination of accommodation and academic uses also gives these shared spaces a reason to remain part of daily routines beyond the timetable of a classroom.
The project retained three facades of the earlier Edwardian Baroque college building. Behind them, glulam elements give the south cloister its repeated arches, while the curved metal-clad roof establishes a new outline. Old and new therefore meet through more than a change of material. The inherited entrance and the continuing route offer a way to understand the addition as another chapter in the site's use. The roof ties together the varied programme without requiring every room beneath it to have the same character.
The Smile, made for the 2016 London Design Festival, condenses movement and structure into a single inhabitable arc. Constructed from cross-laminated American tulipwood, the pavilion extended 34 metres and opened at both ends. Visitors entered near its central low point and walked along the rising interior towards framed views. Its collaboration with the American Hardwood Export Council and Arup matters: the unusual shape was also a structural research and fabrication undertaking, rather than a surface applied to a conventional box.
A temporary pavilion can concentrate attention on a short encounter; a college must accommodate repetition, privacy and changing needs over many years. Brooks' work becomes interesting where it acknowledges that difference. The Smile makes the act of crossing a timber structure the principal event. Cohen Quad distributes moments of spatial intensity among quieter, more ordinary rooms. In both, formal invention can be judged by the opportunities it gives occupants: where to stop, what to see, and how to share a place without surrendering every possibility of retreat.