Housing Generosity: an interview with Alison Brooks
As part of the 2025 edition of #Untagged magazine, students from the previous edition and magazine editors, Milagros Ucha (M.U.) and Kailey Akins (K.A.), interview the renowned architect and MCH professor Alison Brooks (A.B).
For this occasion, a Zoom meeting is held where the three architects share their impressions of Alison’s approach to architectural projects, as well as her experience at the MCH and the main theme of this edition: «Generosity in architecture».
M.U.
Alison, thank you so much for joining us today. Kailey and I are editing this year’s edition of the Untagged magazine, and our aim is to highlight outstanding projects within a set theme. In this third edition, we decided to center the magazine around the concept of generosity in housing, which is something that came up a lot during the past year. We thought that you would be the perfect person to talk about this because your work encompasses this idea in scale, as well as quality.
We were quite interested in a quote that you have in one interview, from the architect series, where you said that you can’t do housing without doing urban design. Related to this, we wanted to ask you, whether in relation to a single residence, neighborhood, or city, what does it look like when the urban scale recognizes appropriation? And, what place does adaptability have at a scale where the public can be participants?
A.B.
It’s great to be speaking too. And I think as you know, my four ideals as an architect are authenticity, generosity, civicness, and beauty. And so generosity is sort of baked into my approach to architecture generally, but I think it has additional impact and meaning and value when it’s applied to housing.
I think in kind of, straightforward terms, urban design is, and housing is very much about, the public realm. And, I actually believe that housing is the public realm. The form, facades, entrances, scale, mass—all of that—they are the frame for the public realm that we exist in. Sometimes I call it civic architecture, and that housing is the most important type of civic architecture because it impacts the most people. It affects their quality of life and their experience of the everyday. And that’s why, in my view, housing has to give back a lot to civic life. The client of housing is the public. It’s not just the developer. It’s the city, and it’s also the future. You know? It’s the future city, future generations.
We also normally try to reintroduce public spaces such as garden squares, which are a very English thing — wonderful pieces of green space in the city that are slightly anarchic. Anybody can go there dressed anyway and do just about anything (that’s not illegal), and it’s a great tradition. The idea of a park is then obviously concentrated into square, garden square, in the context of London, but also piazzas—hard spaces, spaces with trees, pavements, and sidewalks. I think housing is about making great streets, and so I also sometimes call the work we do street architecture.
This terminology, “street architecture”, comes from the nineteenth century, when developers and surveyors were laying out new neighbourhoods in the UK. They built in accordance with an unwritten set of rules – the building line, how wide the sidewalks were, how far back the buildings were from the edge of the pavement, the heights, the scale – and they described that as “street architecture”, because there was an implicit understanding of the city. There was a sort of adherence to a code – a design code – that was never formalized, but the most beautiful cities in Europe and around the world were built in the nineteenth century, according to these unwritten rules of street architecture, with axes, focal points and monumental public spaces. We don’t really have the opportunity to do that very much anymore, because we’re busy filling in the gaps from the twentieth century.
I hope that gave you a sense of what I mean when I say that housing is urban design. It’s the responsibility of housing to be reciprocal—to respond to the needs and desires and dreams of the public and not just the clients who are potentially living in those buildings.
M.U.
Yes. Absolutely. I think it definitely gives us a sense of that. And, since we were talking more about the urban scale and this idea of making a space your own, what qualities do you think play an important role in creating spaces that can allow a wide variety of ways of living, but without falling into neutrality?
A.B.
Yes. I mean, adaptability is a huge issue generally in architecture today because of the climate crisis, carbon, and trying to make buildings that can adapt over time so that we don’t need to keep tearing down and rebuilding. But at the same time, housing has to comply with quite strict space requirements normally. And, again, there are kind of rules and restrictions in terms of floor area and efficiency. You know, all of these words, they’re just part of the ecosystem of housing design—making buildings affordable by keeping the floor area at a minimum. And I’m always trying to challenge this.
«I’ve never met anybody who needs less space»
… And it’s very interesting because new developments that are built according to these minimal space requirements, like, 50 square meter one bedroom, a 70 square meter two bedroom, and an 80 square meter three bedroom that sort of say a human life is worth 10 square meters, which I don’t think is true. I think the difference is much bigger when you have more people living in a dwelling. So I always try to find ways of increasing the space that people have, in terms of floor area, to give that sense of adaptability and generosity that can sometimes be achieved with ceiling heights. More volume generates a sense of more space and more light, and even things like French doors with Juliet balconies, they create a kind of illusion of there being more space outside just beyond that door. So that connection to space beyond is really, really important, along with finding other ways of being generous—like in common areas, double height spaces, porches, porticos, or places that don’t necessarily qualify for the efficiency calculations.
And I often use the example of the English Georgian terraced house as an example of volumetric generosity and robustness that has adapted over time to every possible use—like the architectural association, which is actually five Georgian terraced houses not together. And, you know, most of the hotels in Central London are actually terraced houses, either Georgian or Victorian, that have been knocked together to make a hotel, university, law office, or any other type of use.
K.A.
I think a lot of those ideas touched on things that will come up in a couple of questions as well, so we can revisit some of that too. And, in terms of your work with the MCH or just in your practice, we also wanted to reflect on the relationship you were discussing between quality, joy, and happiness in a given space. That idea really resonated with us in your work and lectures that you’ve done. We were interested in how you think this might overlap with the ways that you emphasize contextual identity and site history?
A.B.
I can’t really imagine why anybody would want to be an architect if you didn’t want to bring joy into people’s lives with your work. You know, if that’s not the aim, then you’re in the wrong profession. We want beauty to be a part of our life. Architects have a huge responsibility to create places and environments that offer those gifts. And, I think it’s also about meaning. And maybe this is where the question of context comes in—that it’s also about stories. We talk about meaning. But for most people, they kind of want a story behind the design.
So often I’m asked, where did an idea come from? As if, you know, you sort of pluck it from somewhere. Residents of our housing projects love knowing what the backstory is behind the design. For example, One Ashley Road, our scheme in Tottenham Hale, is built on the site where there once was a whole neighborhood that was the barrel pencil factory (the barrel eagle pencil with the orange hexagonal planform).
And, a sort of hexagonal planform became a way of resolving all these really unusual geometries of the site and extruding that planform and carving away at it. That was really inspired or reinforced by this idea of a pencil and the pencil factory being part of the history of the site. It also informed the color of the brick and then a whole kind of iconography around hexagons that we used for the balustrades and the tiling and various other things in the building. And, when we tell residents that was the inspiration behind the design, it makes them really happy to know that they’re actually living in a place that has an idea behind it—that connects to memory, that connects to the path, that connects to the place, and that they’re part of that story of the place.
K.A.
I think that actually works well into our next question, which I think we’re both very excited about. For reference, we got this from your interview with the Second Studio Podcast (ep.317). And, as you were discussing in the last question, we really resonated with the ways that architecture can not only be animated itself, but also that it can be alive even within its context. We wanted to ask you what elements specifically, whether spatial or otherwise, make your own experience of architecture feel animated?
M.U.
In the podcast we are referencing, you talked about how as children we see architecture as places that are animated, and as having this extra living space. And this is what was resonating with us—we found that very interesting particularly.
A.B.
Yes. I think these ideas can be transferred between architecture and places or even nature. It’s amazing if you look at children’s storybooks, practically every animal in a children’s storybook has a personality and a character. You know, we personify animals for children. We personify nature, trees, and plants. They become characters in stories. Also, this idea of a kind of spirit, you know, a spirit of a place.
We often talk about, whether it’s in nature or even cities, the fact that we can say we love London. How can you love an entire city with 10,000,000 people in it? You know? It’s sort of like London becomes personified. It’s an identifiable character.
But I think, if we speak specifically about architecture, I’ve felt perhaps with buildings prior to the twentieth century that architectural language, form, and iconography were—there was a lot of effort made—to give buildings character and personality. It even goes to the Baroque, for example. In the Baroque era, it was all about expressing a kind of exuberance, life, growth and expansion. And, you know, the complex geometries and curves. It’s like buildings are billowing with life, music, and exuberance.
And one of the ways that I have tried to do that is with geometry. In particular, housing is quite tricky because apartments and multifamily housing is generally quite cellular and there’s a lot of repetition. But then, as you aggregate those units, you can work with building forms that have geometries at an urban scale that are non orthogonal—they can be faceted, carved in unusual ways, or clad in ways that start to loosen up this relationship between buildings, cities, and individual spaces. For example, in private houses, the geometry of the house is kind of canted or polygonal in order to either focus on views, create focusing spaces, or expand spaces. The architecture is doing something to help you experience the space, place, or view in a more intentional way.
And then another idea where I’ve tried to express this idea of animated architecture is working with a kind of plane—a sort of single plane that is folded to make a space or to make an entire building out of one folded surface. The idea of continuity—that a floor becomes a wall, the wall becomes a roof, and the roof folds, returns, and lifts.
It’s sort of thinking of the elements of architecture in action, rather than just assembling components that you stick together. It’s a more plastic idea of working with architecture—either it’s carving or folding.
And then another thing is pattern and surface because, especially in housing, it’s all about the pattern, which is about working with proportions of openings. You’re creating a pattern of windows, openings, or fenestration that will be seen generally in perspective. You’re generally looking up or down a street. So it’s about making a pattern and, in my view, a pattern that is not static. And I think, in a lot of housing, it’s so much about just ordering these cellular elements that comprise a building. And that can be done beautifully. It’s a very Corbusian thing, freeing the facade from the structure. But that doesn’t mean it needs to be a strip window or one-hundred percent curtain wall. We can still work with windows, French doors, punched openings, but in a way that creates a pattern, and also reflects generosity.
So I guess those three things—geometry, continuity through folding and carving, and pattern and surface—they’re all part of a mission to animate architecture.
M.U.
So with these questions, as you may have seen, we are trying to arrive at a definition, whether partial or not, of generosity and what it means. This is in relation to architecture as a whole, but also specifically to housing. We were wondering if it’s possible to establish some sort of framework for generosity and what do you think is essential to its definition, while also considering that there is this question of affordability that has to be in a way related to it? And, how does the definition of generosity change specifically in housing design? Or maybe you consider it as something that is integrally related.
A.B.
Well, I think, generosity is such a critical idea in all kinds of ways, socially as well as architecturally. I think there’s at least two main kinds of generosity, the measurable and the immeasurable.
The measurable kind of generosity is, I guess, what we would sort of default to when somebody’s speaking about generosity in architecture. It’s something that you can measure. Is the floor area the minimum, or are you giving more space to a dwelling? Are the corridors the minimum, or are they a little bit wider or higher than the minimum? And then there’s volume, which I’ve spoken about. I think I’ve said at one point I’m never going to do housing with less than 2.7 meter high ceilings. But I think I’ve been worked down to 2.6 because it’s quite tough. High ceilings affect the proportions of the facades, which is that kind of civic gesture.
So, yes, there’s floor area and there’s volume, which is kind of less measured. Even though it is measurable, it’s not used as a criteria in selling housing or designing housing. It’s sort of like saying “save some money by squashing all the floors down to the minimum.” But increasingly, cities, planning authorities, and even clients realize that is not a way of creating value—long term value.
But then if we want to talk about more immeasurable ideas of generosity, I think part of that is an architect bringing desires, in terms of what they know are good places to be. And these, I would describe as threshold spaces. You know, what is the arrival experience for someone who lives in a housing scheme, an apartment building, or any type of building? It’s where you have to make a decision whether to go in or stay out or whether you feel welcome to enter. And that can be related to a common area or a private home, like a portico, veranda, or a porch. To have a porch or veranda expresses not only a gesture of welcome, but also a kind of threshold between public and private. You need that layer—what I call also sometimes inhabited edge.
And then another kind of immeasurable thing is just the care in the detail or the effort it takes to, for example, introduce roof lights. You know, in multi-story apartment buildings, practically none of those buildings have roof lights on the top floor—even though it’s an obvious thing to do to bring light into different spaces, to take advantage of the sky. I always try to create opportunities to see the sky, to bring light in from above, and just to intensify the feeling of being in nature. Biophilic design isn’t just about trees and seeing greenery. It’s also about seeing clouds and seeing the sky.
And then, also, care in the details, like specifying a really nice front door with a good handle—the detail of staircases, handrails, or doors. You know, the things in architecture that people touch are generally doors and staircases. And so those are such important moments in projects. I think people actually care in design. People can tell when somebody didn’t care about an elevation or a material or a door. It’s obvious. So that’s where we can make a huge difference. Those small moments in everyday life.
