Alison Brooks to speak at OAA Conference in Niagara Falls

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.