Miroslava Brooks appointed Assistant Professor of Architecture

UCLA Architecture and Urban Design (AUD) is pleased to announce the appointment of Miroslava Brooks, AIA, NCARB, as Assistant Professor of Architecture, effective January 2023. Brooks is a practicing architect and a founding partner of FORMA, a design-driven architecture practice based in New York City and Los Angeles. Academically, Brooks is interested in what constitutes a disciplinary core of architecture today, while her design interests revolve around formal, organizational, and material strategies that merge art, technology and ecology to create closer relationships between buildings and their surrounding environment.

Prior to her UCLA AUD appointment, Brooks taught at the Yale University School of Architecture since 2014, becoming the youngest faculty member in the School’s history to receive the Professor King-Lui Wu Teaching Award. She also taught at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design since 2016 and, most recently, the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, where she was the Kwallek Endowed Chair Visiting Professor.

“I’m thrilled to join the creative community of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture,” Brooks notes. “It is an honor and privilege to teach alongside colleagues I respect and admire, and to participate in the formation of creative ideas and contemporary culture at a great public university and in an exciting global city.”

Brooks co-founded FORMA in 2018 with Daniel Markiewicz as a full-service architecture studio working across various scales and typologies. Through residential projects – Homes – they reconsider built forms of domesticity, from single-family houses and time-shares to multi-generational living and multi-family housing. Through character-driven civic spaces – Commons – the practice explores new forms of collectivity manifested within institutional, cultural, and educational projects.

FORMA’s work includes Pink Thermal Baths (2021; photo above), which earned Architect’s Newspaper’s 2021 Best of Design Award in the Unbuilt Cultural Project category; Atlantic Beach Boardwalk (2022), awarded second prize/co-finalist in an international design competition; Denver House (2021), which was one of four winners of Architectural Record’s 2022 RECORD Kitchen and Bath Competition; and Miami House (2019), which recently received 2022 Best Future House of the Year Award from Global Design News and The Chicago Athenaeum.

Brooks was born and grew up in Slovakia before moving to the USA and attending The Ohio State University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Science in Architecture. She received a Master of Architecture from Yale University School of Architecture, where she was awarded the Gertraud A. Wood Fellowship and the William Wirt Winchester Travelling Fellowship, the school’s most prestigious award.