H. Allen Brooks (6 November 1925, New Haven, Connecticut - 8 August 2010, Hanover, New Hampshire) was an architectural historian and longtime professor at the University of Toronto. Brooks has written on Frank Lloyd Wright and the Prairie School and on the early years of Le Corbusier.
Brooks served as an engineer in the Philippines (1946–47), then pursued his education at Dartmouth College (B.A., 1950), Yale University (M.A., 1955), and Northwestern University (Ph.D., 1957). After one year at the University of Illinois, Brooks joined the faculty of the Department of Fine Art at the University of Toronto, where he taught until retirement in 1986. He occasionally accepted visiting positions and lectured throughout North America, Europe and Australia.
Brooks became known in the early 1970s for his research on Wright and the Prairie School (the name Prairie School has been credited to Brooks). Brooks's first book, The Prairie School: Frank Lloyd Wright and his Midwest Contemporaries (1972), received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award of the Society of Architectural Historians. He has continued to publish on Wright and the Prairie School and has received the "Wright Spirit Award," the highest award granted by the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.
Brooks has also pursued the career of Le Corbusier. His LeCorbusier's Formative Years: Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds, published in 1997, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in biography and won a first prize from the Association of American Publishers for books in architecture and urban planning. Brooks was editor of the 32-volume LeCorbusier Archive providing thorough documentation LeCorbusier's practice.
Brooks was a past board member and president, and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. He was a charter member of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada and a life member of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain.
Read more about H. Allen Brooks: Writings
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