When Alison Brooks speaks about architecture, she uses terms including generosity, civic-ness, the quest for authenticity and beauty. She sees beauty as objective, saying that it speaks to the senses. It is an expression of care, an example of craft and the value of citizenship.
Referring to the benign influence of beauty, she confirms that moments of beauty offer safety, hope, attachment and identity. Beauty is a language that has been lost. She understands and interprets history and culture, materials and structure, spanning scales from the urban scale to the intimate. She takes on challenges. Diagnosing contemporary life so that change, modification and growth form part of her housing propositions, she sees housing as the most hard-working form of architecture. Aiming for generosity in volume and height, she advocates for 2.6 m high ceilings to ensure natural light, believing that if proportions are mean, then the expression will be mean. For her, proportion, craft and beauty are intertwined. Versatility in housing invents future possibilities of use.
In this Biennale Architettura exploring freespace, she presents ways of experiencing “dwelling space as civic infrastructure that enables human potential”, clustering elements to heighten experiences, using timber as the binding, versatile material.
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Alison Brooks Architects
Recasting