Alison Brooks: "Exposed wood helps people feel better"

BarcelonaCanadian architect Alison Brooks was born in Toronto in 1962. She moved to London in 1988 and founded her own practice in 1996. Throughout her career, in addition to Canada and the UK, she has built in Sweden, Italy, Germany, and Australia. She is also the only UK architect to have received the country's three most prestigious awards for completed works: the RIBA Stirling Prize, the Stephen Lawrence Prize, and the Manser Medal. Brooks is currently in Barcelona as one of the subjects of a documentary at the new edition of the Barq architecture film festival. Forested future. Our restaurant, our relationship with the natural world (Thursday at the Girona cinemas at 6 pm), directed by Petr Krejčí, and sponsored by the American Hardwood Export Council (AHEC). She will also give a talk at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC).

"Wood is one of the ways in which architecture comes closest to nature," explains Alison Brooks, who believes that "working with wood, because of all its intrinsic qualities—the grain, the color, the feel, all the haptic qualities of wood and its visual aspect—is a natural experience." "The way wood expresses growth and the passage of time through the grain connects us to something greater than ourselves: nature and the unman-made world," she adds.

Brooks has occasionally defined his vision as "a bridge between memory and the future," in line with an architecture rooted in and with a strong cultural character. "That means authentically expressing the culture of a place, the context of a place. Cultural memory is something we need as human beings to understand that everything we do has a legacy, a kind of ancestor, especially in architecture," he says. "This idea of rejecting the past and embracing modernity, a kind of radical future without history, I think is a myth. Everything we do in design, in architecture, and in art has roots in the history of ideas, in the history of culture," he emphasizes.

Brooks has also always prioritized adapting to the site where he builds over having a recognizable language. "Connecting the present with our collective past and seeing a point of reference is a pathway to an alternative future, to continue searching for a better way to inhabit our planet," he asserts. And to integrate herself into the different countries where she works, Brooks researches to understand "the geography, the topography, the climate, population patterns over time, who the people are who have contributed to that place and its history." More specifically, it's about "noticing things about that place that the people who use it every day might not appreciate, and finding these elements or these kinds of clues as a way to come in and find a new expression for this site."

In this sense, among her recent works is the Cohen Quadrangle at Exeter College, Oxford University, the first designed by a female architect. It is a multifunctional building that houses dormitories, classrooms, and an auditorium, and is notable for a corridor covered with a barrel vault made of spruce arches. "The organization of a monastery, which became the collegiate model for universities, is an organization that can be reinterpreted today, despite being a typology from two thousand years ago. Monastic tradition is something that is always being reinterpreted in universities and collegiate architecture. So it's about finding this kind of source and working from contemporary ones, those of teaching and learning, and ensuring that the building also responds to the city in a new way."

Even so, wood is still a minority material in the construction world. "As the industry grows, costs will come down. In countries like Austria and Germany, there's a very mature timber industry, and there's also quite a bit in the Basque Country," says Brooks. On the other hand, for wood to expand, he believes it's necessary to "eliminate the stigma surrounding fire risk, because there are many ways to do it. Wood is, in fact, naturally fire-resistant thanks to charring. But you have to make the beams large enough to absorb the charring layer in case of a fire. Addressing the fire problem is key," he explains. "One of the best things is eliminating the need to use plasterboard or drywall, which have a very high carbon footprint."

Regarding the economic factor behind the rise of timber architecture, he believes it's necessary to find a way to make it attractive "to developers and clients of all kinds," something that is already happening in the office sector. "Many office buildings are being built with solid timber in both the UK and North America. Exposed timber helps people feel better. The principles of biophilic design have been shown to improve feelings of well-being and mental health, and I think this is because exposed timber offers a deep and primal connection with nature in any context."

A pioneering wooden structure

In the field of architecture made with wood, Brooks was a pioneer in 2016 with The smileThe first project made with large cross-laminated hardwood panels. The entire structure is made with just 12 giant tulipwood panels, each measuring 14 meters long and 4.5 meters wide. However, although it was a step forward in demonstrating that wood is commercially viable, the development was shelved. "I'm not sure if it was because of Brexit or what happened, but the engineering firm, Arup, was basically doing a search to get that laminated timber certified in the UK, but I don't think they succeeded, partly because the wood was American, the manufacturing German, and it was being used in the UK."

"The project is still in the potential stage, and what's great about The smile "The laminated timber was made from discarded wood scraps," Brooks adds. "One of the great advantages of wood is that there is no waste. When you have a log, the bark is used as a base material for all kinds of products; every piece of wood is used in some way, whether as veneer or structural timber. And in many places, especially in Germany, they generate energy with a wood-burning furnace, which is very clean."

If the fact that The smile Passing through different countries made it difficult for it to move forward, and with Trump's tariff policy, the situation has worsened. "It's a very difficult time, and it's also very hard, especially for American and Canadian timber producers, because the industries benefited from a reciprocal exchange of materials: softwoods from western Canada went to the United States, and hardwoods from the eastern United States went up to all of Canada. There's no benefit to what's happening with the tariffs. Timber has been exported internationally for centuries;

However, Brooks believes this situation may have a positive side. "The good thing about this type of crisis in global trade is the renewed attention, interest, and care for native forests, for the ecosystems and cultures of each country, and how we can make them more sustainable and more productive." Working with wood is a way of life: the people who manage the forests, who fell the trees, who work with cross-laminated timber, embody a tradition, a way of life, a culture that has hundreds, and in the case of the indigenous peoples of North America, thousands and thousands of years of symbiotic relationship with the forests.”

Thus, reforestation projects are proliferating in the United Kingdom and Ireland. “I think we are at a point in architecture where we are truly deeply committed to the provenance of the materials we use. And this idea of a circular economy means that we have to think about the end-of-life of every product we use, about the buildings we design so that they can be recycled, adapted, reused, and last a very long time,” he says.

And in this, Brooks calls for recovering values from before the industrial revolution and updating them. “It’s about thinking about how buildings and the environment were made before the industrial revolution. I think it's a very interesting moment in which we need to reclaim some of those earlier values and bring them into a future way of thinking. It also has to do with craftsmanship, with identity, with ornamentation, and with all those attributes of architecture that were once part of the architecture of the past. People come to Europe and to historical sites to see this testimony of a way of building rooted in place, in culture, in the craft. And I think this is being rethought for our time.