

Stuart Weitzman School of Design
102 Meyerson Hall
210 South 34th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
Vanessa Grossman is an architect, historian, and curator whose work explores the intersection of architecture with ideology, power, governance, and the fight for social and environmental justice. Her work focuses on Cold War-era local and global practices and geopolitical formations, with a particular emphasis on architecture and politics in France and Latin America, notably Brazil. Her research and teaching interests include urban and housing histories, discourses of developmentalism in the Global South, the politics of climate change, legacies of the avant-garde and architectural theories of the everyday, intersectional feminism, and the epistemological frameworks shaping architectural culture, exhibitions, and archives. Her next research project examines the history of architecture and resource extraction in the Amazon rainforest, where she lived as a child.
Among her latest books is A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024), which looks at how political communism and architectural modernism became mutually reinforcing ideologies during France’s Fifth Republic, circulating across networks of architects, civil servants, intellectuals, activists, and politicians. A Concrete Alliance explores the work of Renée Gailhoustet (one of the rare female architects of her generation), Jean Renaudie, and members of the Atelier d’Urbanisme et d’Architecture (AUA), alongside their collaborations with architectural elders such as Jean Prouvé and Oscar Niemeyer, who had self-exiled to France. The book situates their work within the intellectual framework of contemporary Marxist thinkers like Louis Althusser and Henri Lefebvre. Offering a new perspective on the material history of the global Cold War, A Concrete Alliance examines the intertwined fates of Algeria, Brazil, France’s banlieues, and the Soviet Union, uncovering the political, cultural, and image-making power of architecture—particularly housing.
Grossman is committed to collaborative approaches in researching, teaching, writing and curating. She is the co-editor of Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha (with Jean-Louis Cohen; Porto: Casa da Arquitectura, 2024, distributed by Yale University Press), Everyday Matters: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture (with Ciro Miguel; Berlin: Ruby Press, 2021), AUA, une architecture de l'engagement, 1960–1985 (with Jean-Louis Cohen; Paris: Cité de l'architecture/Éditions Dominique Carré, 2015) and Modernity: Promise or Menace? France, 101 buildings, 1914–2014 (with Jean-Louis Cohen; Paris: Institut français/Éditions Dominique Carré, 2014). She is also the co-author of Oscar Niemeyer en France. Un exil créatif (with Benoît Pouvreau; Paris: Éditions du patrimoine, 2021) and the author of Le PCF a changé! Niemeyer et le siège du Parti Communiste (Paris: Éditions B2, 2013) and A arquitetura e o urbanismo revisitados pela Internacional Situacionista (São Paulo: Annablume/FAPESP, 2006). Grossman has published several book chapters and essays on related themes in scholarly journals and the architectural press, including a December 2020 special issue of the Swiss werk, bauen + wohnen dedicated to Renée Gailhoustet's housing projects in Ivry-sur-Seine, France.
She has co-curated symposia and exhibitions at venues around the world, including the Centro Cultural São Paulo, the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris, São Paulo’s Sesc 24 de Maio, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. Recent co-curated exhibitions include Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha (with Jean-Louis Cohen; May 2023–September 2024) at Casa da Arquitectura in Portugal, as well as the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, titled Todo dia/Everyday (with Ciro Miguel and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes; September–December 2019). She was the assistant curator of Modernity, Promise or Menace?, the French Pavilion at the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale (2014), curated by Jean-Louis Cohen, which received a special mention from the jury. She was also the co-organizer of the The Observers Observed: The Architectural Uses of Ethnography conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre (with Dirk van den Heuvel and Nelson Mota; Delft and Rotterdam, 2021). In addition to her curatorial work, Grossman has been appointed Exhibitions Review Editor for the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH, 2023–2026) and serves on the editorial board of Manifest: A Journal of the Americas.
Grossman is an affiliated faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Latin American and Latinx Studies. Prior to joining the Weitzman School standing faculty, Grossman was an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH). She has also taught at the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design, the Princeton University School of Architecture, the National School of Architecture of Versailles, and the University of Miami School of Architecture. Grossman also worked as Assistant to Editor for the French journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui.
Vanessa Grossman holds a professional diploma in architecture and urbanism from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo, an MA in the History of Architecture from the Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Department of Art and Archaeology, and both an MA and PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from the Princeton University School of Architecture.
Vanessa Grossman has received several awards, including the 2015 Carter Manny Award for doctoral dissertation writing from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the 2013 Chateaubriand Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Embassy of France in the United States. Her research has also been supported by the University of Pennsylvania’s Mellon-funded Humanities, Urbanism, and Design (H+U+D) Initiative, the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications at Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology, and two Grants to Individuals from the Graham Foundation (2019 and 2021). Additionally, she has been awarded a Doctoral Exchange Fellowship from Sciences Po Paris, a Lassen Fellowship from the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies. Other notable funding includes a Collection Research Grant from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a Bourse Master Île-de-France, as well as an Award for Scientific Publication and a Scientific Initiation Scholarship from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).