The public perception of architects is skewed by a media that portrays a one-dimensional view of the profession, the architect Alison Brooks has said.

In an exclusive interview with CLAD, Brooks argued that the media should talk less about the image of a building and “more about how a project is so much bigger than what you see at the end."

“It’s a hard story to tell, the complexity around delivering architecture,” she admitted. “It spans helping the client write the brief and raise money for the project, working with user groups and engineers, responding to iconography and history and culture and instincts. It’s a kind of giant tangle of inputs that we have to untangle to create something that helps people identify with a place.”

Brooks, designer of The Smile, the Quarterhouse Performing Arts Centre in Folkestone, UK, and a range of award-winning housing projects, said that architecture profession must address the lack of public understanding that architects are on their side.

“Architects have a responsibility to protect the public realm,” she said. “It’s a role we provide, that’s not generally acknowledged.

“Most architects spend inordinate amounts of time fighting for improvement to civic space, introducing new squares and gardens, to open our projects to a more public audience. We also fight very hard and take big risks to try to deliver designs that satisfy a need for identity, for beauty and for meaning.

“We never get a brief that says ‘we require a beautiful, meaningful, characterful building that delivers the highest quality of space for a 300 year future’, but that’s what we’re all fighting for. It’s just not what’s understood by the public and society at large.”

Brooks also spoke about the future for timber building. Her practice designed The Smile for the London Design Festival last year, which was described by Arup engineer Andrew Lawrence, who worked on the project, as “the most complex cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure ever built.”

“Timber has huge potential as a building material,” said Brooks. “It’s practically the only way to build in a zero carbon way, to reduce our carbon footprint and to make construction more precise and quicker on site. There are almost no downsides to building with timber CLT.

“Timber buildings are always well loved by their users. When you complete a CLT building everybody enjoys the authenticity of the material. People connect to timber emotionally, spiritually and intellectually in a different way from how they do to a high intensity manufactured material like concrete.”

Brooks and her firm are currently working on a range of projects in the UK, including four residential towers with leisure and co-working space as part of the Greenwich Peninsula scheme in south-east London, a Maggie's Center in Taunton, Somerset, and a range of housing projects in Oxford, Cambridge and London.

London mayor Sadiq Khan appointed Brooks as a design advocate for the city last year, along with 49 other high profile architects.

The full interview with Alison Brooks features in the latest issue of CLAD’s quarterly title CLADmag, which can be read online and on digital turning pages.

The magazine also includes interviews with architects Steven Holl and Odile Decq, landscape specialist Adriaan Geuze and designers Ed Ng and Alice Lund.

Alison Brooks' 'The Smile' demonstrates potential of hardwood megastructures

FEATURE: Interview – Alison Brooks