“We were doing something in Tel Aviv which was a completely free-form piece of architecture inside a really big, corporate piece of architecture,” Brooks says. “We were doing it as a kind of protest piece, and we thought that the whole world was going to stop and take notice, and hundreds of operas were going to call us up and ask us to do their next opera building, which of course didn’t happen.”

Arad and Brooks did, however, receive commissions for several other projects in London, including the restaurants Belgo Noord and Belgo Centraal, which were as celebrated for their design as for their food.

Brooks had come to London from Ontario, Canada, where she had grown up, attended Waterloo School of Architecture, and worked for, among others, A. J. Diamond. She moved to London to escape the Toronto architecture scene. Working with Arad in his Covent Garden furniture showroom afforded Brooks the opportunity to extend her design skills and have a major say in the development of a practice. By the time of the Belgo restaurant commissions, Brooks had become a partner in the firm, but because of her evolving design philosophy, she decided that the time had come to set out on her own.

“I wanted to address some of the big, big problems that need to be addressed, particularly in London,” Brooks says. “The quality of housing and the quality of public space really suffered in the 1980s under Thatcher, and there’s been, in the last 10 years in London, a movement to start investing in the public realm and looking at things that haven’t been looked at in a long time: new forms of housing, sustainable housing, urban design and infrastructure—all of that stuff that Britain’s been pretty far behind on. So that was my big ambition.”

She set up her practice in a spare room of her home and sent letters to potential clients. She kept busy with some smaller jobs, including a scheme for an “egg” that was featured in a proposal for an intermodal train station in Bilbao, Spain. “These are the kinds of things you do when you’ve got a new practice and you’re waiting for the big one to walk in the door,” she says.

Then one of her letters paid off, and she was invited to design the guest rooms, interiors, and public spaces for a new resort hotel on a German island in the North Sea. The Atoll Helgoland Hotel has brought Brooks much acclaim in Europe, as well as new commissions for everything from private homes to university buildings. So from her first grand plans to working out of her house, to running a firm, that has averaged five designers in the last five years, Brooks is once again in a position to try to try to improve the quality of the urban environment.

But even considering her concern with social issues, she is difficult to pigeonhole as a designer. “The main point I try to make,” she says, “is that the idiosyncrasies of each project drive different solutions. I really like the fact that people don’t know what they’re getting with me.”

Kevin Lerner

The Projects | The Firm
Click photos to see more of each project.