Vanessa Grossman

Vanessa Grossman is an architect, historian, and curator whose work explores the intersections of architecture, ideology, power, governance, and the pursuit of social and environmental justice. Her research centers on Cold War-era architectural practices, tracing the geopolitical entanglements of architecture and politics in France and Brazil, while also engaging broader contexts across Latin America and the Global South. An additional focus of her work examines the political and ideological engagement of influential women architects during the Cold War—especially Lina Bo Bardi (1914–1992) and Renée Gailhoustet (1929–2023)—who, as editors-in-chief, museum directors, and chief architects, played transformative roles in reshaping urban and cultural landscapes. Her teaching and scholarly interests span urban and housing histories, developmentalist discourses in the Global South, the politics of climate change, the legacies of the avant-garde, Brutalism, theories of the everyday, and the epistemological foundations of architectural culture, exhibitions, and archives. Her forthcoming research project investigates the architectural history of resource extraction in the Amazon rainforest—where she spent part of her childhood—with particular attention to company towns and their connections to Pennsylvania’s industrial legacy.

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 lens on the material history of the global Cold War, A Concrete Alliance traces the intertwined histories of Algeria, Brazil, France’s banlieues, and the Soviet Union, showing how architecture—especially housing—helped shape political agendas, not only through its techno-political frameworks but also through its cultural meanings.

Her forthcoming books are Reframing Lina Bo Bardi: Architecture as an Expanded Field (Routledge, 2026, with Pablo Meninato) and Parti pris. Architectes et communisme en France, 1958–1980 (Éditions de La Villette, 2026). Grossman is committed to collaborative approaches in researching, teaching, writing and curating. She is the co-editor of Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha (English and Portuguese, 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 (English and French, 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. More recently, she authored "Brutalism’s Politics, Then and Now," which examines the intersections of politics and architecture in the work of Brazilian architect João Batista Vilanova Artigas (1915–1985), published in Log 64, "Toward a Newer Brutalism, or the Undecorated Shed" (Summer 2025). 

She has co-curated symposia and exhibitions at institutions around the world, including the Centro Cultural São Paulo; the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris; Sesc 24 de Maio in São Paulo; the Venice Architecture Biennale; Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam; the University of Pennsylvania; and Princeton University. Her most recent symposium, Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia, was co-organized in February 2025 with Professor Catherine Seavitt, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. The event brought together an interdisciplinary roster of speakers from both within and beyond the Amazon rainforest. Recent co-curated exhibitions include Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha  (with Jean-Louis Cohen), held at Casa da Arquitectura in Portugal (May 2023–September 2024), and the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo, Todo dia / Everyday (with Ciro Miguel and Charlotte Malterre-Barthes; September–December 2019). She was the associate curator of Une architecture de l'engagement : l'AUA (1960-1985) at the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris (with Jean-Louis Cohen; October 2015–February 2016), and assistant curator of Modernity, Promise or Menace?, the French Pavilion at the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale (2014), also curated by Jean-Louis Cohen, which received a special mention from the jury. She also co-organized the conference The Observers Observed: The Architectural Uses of Ethnography at the Jaap Bakema Study Centre (with Dirk van den Heuvel and Nelson Mota; Delft and Rotterdam, 2021). In addition to her curatorial work, Grossman serves as the 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 as well as an external affiliated faculty member at Princeton University Brazil Lab. Prior to joining the Weitzman School standing faculty, Grossman was a Tenure-Track 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-in-Chief for the French architectural journals L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui and Archistorm, and as a contributor for AMC.