Vanessa Grossman

Vanessa Grossman is an architect, historian, and curator whose work examines the intersection of architecture with ideology, power, governance, and the pursuit of social and environmental justice. Her research investigates Cold War-era local and global practices, focusing on the geopolitical entanglement of architecture and politics in France and Brazil, while also addressing broader themes across Latin America and the Global South. 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, and the epistemological frameworks shaping architectural culture, exhibitions, and archives. Her next research project examines the architectural history of resource extraction in the Amazon rainforest—where she spent part of her childhood—with a focus on company towns and their ties to Pennsylvania’s industrial past.

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.

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, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University. Her most recent symposium, Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia, co-organized in February 2025 with Catherine Seavitt, Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, 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; 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-in-Chief for the French architectural journals L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui and Archistorm, and as a contributor for AMC.