Along the base and uppermost portions of Cadence, a red-brick residential project designed by Canadian-British architect Alison Brooks in London’s King’s Cross neighbourhood, rows of double-height arches of varying widths establish a lively sense of rhythm. Brooks has heard people link these arches to a full range of different architectural styles and movements — everything from Afrofuturism to Middle Eastern design. To me, they bring to mind the Land of the Sweets interlude in The Nutcracker, during which Mother Ginger, dressed in a gargantuan hoop skirt, leads a posse of dancing gumdrops.

For the record, Brooks says her original reference point was the vaulted brick walls at the nearby St. Pancras railway station — but she’s more than happy to hear visitors form their own associations. “I consider that an achievement,” she tells me at her Kentish Town studio the day after a media tour of the project. “Everybody who comes to this building, it reminds them of something in their memory, which means that they’re connecting with it in some way. It’s relatable.”

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Brooks says she aspires to create architecture that is “pluralistic” — layering together references to different periods and places, near and far, to introduce something that is open to a wide range of interpretations. During our conversation, she will soon go on to explain that, along with the Victorian Gothic stylings of St. Pancras station, Cadence also owes a debt to the Venice Canals and second- and 17th-century Roman architecture. “I think it’s taken 150 years to reach a point in architectural culture where architects feel unconstrained by any one set of ideologies or dogmas or stylistic rules,” she says of her approach. As a residential complex with 163 units (60 of them affordable apartments managed by the rental agency Pocket Living), Cadence is ready to be many things to many people.

To the British real estate developer Related Argent, the project’s pair of residential towers — one 16 storeys, and the other 12, with the two connected by a six-sided perimeter block — are, in some ways, the crown jewels at the top of its 67-acre redevelopment of the King’s Cross railway lands, which has played out over the past two decades. Based on a master plan by Allies and Morrison, Porphyrios Associates and Townshend Landscape Architects, the once-industrial area now features two continuous rows — one on either side of Lewis Cubitt Park — of commercial and residential projects by a who’s who of prominent design firms. And standing, triumphantly, at the end of that procession is Cadence. 

Brooks, who won the project commission through an architectural competition, did not approach this landmark site lightly. In fact, she was adamant that her building appear heavy. “Expressing gravity — and celebrating it — was quite a radical proposition,” she says. “It challenges a lot of conventions that have come with the modernist project of trying to make buildings appear weightless and completely transparent, and forgetting about the way a tall building meets the ground.” (Brooks also discussed this design philosophy in Stefan Novakovic’s 2024 interview with her as part of an Azure feature about London architects working on significant Toronto projects.) Thanks to its recessed balconies, Cadence is punctuated by voids rather than flat glazing. “There are still a lot of windows, and the apartments are super bright, but there’s a good balance of transparency and mass, and light and shadow,” Brooks says. On another of the project’s faces, select balconies are cantilevered, adding to the intriguing sense of depth.

On the other hand, the solid parts of Cadence — formed with handmade British brick precast into panels — have a smooth, red heft. Brooks says she wanted each tower to appear as a single, monumental entity, as if “sculpted from clay.” In turn, you need to get up quite close before you can make out the individual building components. “Your eye can rest on the silhouette and shape of the arches, without being distracted by all the detail around them,” she says. “It allows the architecture to feel more essential and elemental.” Her aspiration was to match classical Roman construction — a constant source of inspiration ever since she studied in the city as part of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture’s legendary Rome program. (While she’s been a resident of London for the past four decades, Brooks grew up in Welland, Ontario.) “Places like Hadrian’s Villa and the Roman Forum have this kind of overpowering sense of singularity of form and material,” she says. “They’ve made sculpting and carving a kind of obsession of mine.”

As important as modelmaking is in refining her forms (and her studio proudly exhibits a half-dozen Cadence miniatures, ranging from raw, abstract maquettes to professional sales centre replicas), Brooks ultimately credits the art of hand-sketching for shaping the building’s varied arches. “When you have to draw a lot of arches in a row, it becomes very gestural and free-form — it’s not controlled,” she explains. “So I thought, let’s just go for it — really loosen up the arches and colonnade, and make it more playful, sort of like arches that are dancing around the building.” Hence the name, Cadence. 

More playfulness waits in the building’s lobby and courtyard, which both engage in another key fascination of Brooks’s: architectural illusions. In the foyer (anchored by a sculptural, semi-cylindrical brass-clad mailbox unit, as part of the interior design by Conran and Partners), a pair of floor-to-ceiling mirrors create the appearance that the arches forming the space’s vaulted ceiling carry on down a long arcade. Admittedly, Brooks would have preferred that they actually did, but the space behind the mirror is marked for a future commercial tenant. Nevertheless, thanks to a visual sleight of hand, she can have her spectacle and still meet the financial realities of real estate development, too. 

Meanwhile, in the outdoor courtyard that links the lobby to the building’s amenity lounge, a series of arched metal doors that lead to areas like the garbage room and a bike storage area are decorated with a pattern that suggests they are instead passages to additional colonnades. As she’s discussing them, Brooks pulls out her phone to display a photo of Francesco Borromini’s forced perspective gallery at Galleria Spada — seemingly, an expansive colonnade leading to a majestic statue that sits in front of a grand garden. In fact, the hallway is deceptively short, the sculpture is a miniature, and the garden is a painted backdrop. “I think illusion has always been part of architecture,” she says. “Even Mies did fake columns and beams to adhere to a grid. It’s about amplifying experience. It’s a pleasurable thing, and I think it should be welcomed.”

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Brooks uses the word “generous” a lot during the rest of her tour — “a generous foyer,” “generous spaces,” “a generous arrival point” — in a way that makes it clear that generosity is a core value of her design process. She stresses, in particular, the care that a residential architect must pay to a person’s “journey home.” Interestingly, this is something that she feels Canadian homes do especially well. “I always want to have a sort of portico or a veranda, which comes from my Canadian heritage — that threshold that creates a sense of care and welcome,” she says. 

In Cadence, this buffer zone plays out across three acts: the aforementioned lobby, the outdoor courtyard it leads to, and the double-height “community room” amenity space on the other side of it. “Sometimes there are birthday parties in there, but sometimes it’s just two people in there working from home without just being at their kitchen table, and enjoying being in a really big space,” says Brooks. The expansive arched glass windows on either end of both the foyer and the community room ensure that, walking up to the building, you can see right through the building to any neighbours at work, and beyond, back out to London. In other words, coming home connects people to their surroundings — both in terms of their immediate and extended community. “Making spaces that are sort of appended to the main circulation spine is a really effective way to create opportunities for people to have sight of their neighbours,” says Brooks. The courtyard (designed with landscape architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan) functions as its own gathering spot, with steps leading down to a serene reflecting pool modelled — in another nod to historic Italy — after Venice’s canals. Above, conical pendants hang suspended from a graceful arrangement of tightrope-like cables.

From there, the rest of the journey home plays out closer to typical condo conventions. “Of course, you have to go up the lift to get to the upper stories, but I always try to make sure that when you come out of the lift, you can see a window to know where you are, so it’s naturally lit and not completely internal,” Brooks continues. “And it’s about what you touch on that journey — the door hardware, and the material of the actual door. It’s about feeling oriented and feeling cared for.”

Pedestrians simply passing by — or visiting the complex’s adjacent playground, by Root and Erect — will benefit from this same level of consideration. “In Cadence, there are 13 corners, and each one of those is an opportunity for a really great dual-aspect facade that can be seen as an interesting moment that contributes to the streetscape,” Brooks notes. At lunch and dinner time, many will flock to Bubala King’s Cross, the third location of a beloved local Middle Eastern restaurant, and the first of three commercial tenants that will eventually animate Cadence’s ground level. Brooks points out that the project’s double-height allowed for an intimate mezzanine private dining room that has proven to be an especially big hit, offering views down to the busy restaurant below as well as out to Coal Drop Yards in the distance.

Granted, Cadence’s lively surroundings did add some complications to the design process. For one thing, the two railway tunnels running below the building dictated much of its massing, shaping where the design’s dancing archways could and could not touch down. Informed by vibration data from the railway tunnels, isolation bearings were installed at the foundation level, which allowed for a lighter-weight steel superstructure and hollow-core flooring above. Otherwise, another major hurdle was the compact construction site. The project builder, Laing O’Rourke, embraced offsite fabrication wholeheartedly, working with Brooks and the design team to ensure everything from the bathroom pods to the elevator system could be carted into the site ready-to-go for rapid assembly. (The project’s prefab lift marks a world-first.) The façade, for its part, was developed around the sweet spot between variety and modularity, with each particular arch shape repeated just as many times as its formwork would allow.

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Arches have been having a moment in modern architecture. In New York, David Adjaye’s recent 130 William residential tower also went all-in on the shape — although in that case, the uniformity of the building’s windows adds up to something that feels more severe than Cadence’s exuberant expression. And while Brooks is adamant that she isn’t looking to become known for the shape, it turns up again in her upcoming design for 405 Sherbourne, a Toronto Community Housing tower designed in partnership with architects—Alliance. (Brooks notes that arches, again, have a historical precedent in the neighbourhood, in the form of the curved windows on Cabbagetown’s Romanesque Revival homes.) Elsewhere in Toronto, Cobe Architects is set to bring its own arch-heavy student residence to the University of Toronto.

But arches alone are not enough to evoke the kinds of strong associations that Brooks has heard people share during their visits to Cadence. My hunch is that the reason so many people feel such an immediate connection to the project is, perhaps counterintuitively, because it captures so much of the soul of its designer. People can detect A.I. slop, and they know when a residential project is being dictated by a spreadsheet. Here, instead, is an unabashed celebration of a designer’s particular passions — from ancient Roman architecture to visual illusions. In incorporating so many personal touches, it encourages people to react personally, too.

When invited upstairs to tour two of the units at Cadence, I initially find it hard to focus on their architectural merits (though they are as sun-soaked and efficiently organized as you might hope) in light of all the charming individual accents that their owners have added. In one of the kitchens, a botanical illustration of five fennel bulbs that look to be in the middle of a dance party catches my eye. (I learn that it’s by British artist Trevor Haddrell.) A day later, the drawing returns to mind as Brooks shares her own memories of dancing in the King’s Cross railway yards back when she had first moved to London. “It was still kind of a no-go zone, but it had this underworld nightlife, and I did go clubbing,” she says. “There were certain warehouses that had been converted into nightclubs. I think one of them was called Arches.”

The colonnade in Cadence’s foyer might be just an optical illusion, but gaze into it long enough, and you’ll find it leads in very real directions: into historical London, into Brooks’s own personal and professional biography and, now that the project is complete, into the collective memory of everyone who will stand in front of that wall each day as part of their dignified journey home.