Azzurra Cox and Vanessa Grossman Join Weitzman Faculty

Weitzman welcomes landscape architect and writer Azzurra Cox and architect, historian, and curator Vanessa Grossman to the faculty.

Azzurra Cox is joining the faculty in the Department of Landscape Architecture as an assistant professor beginning with the 2023-2024 Academic Year. She is primarily interested in the power of landscapes to shape collective narratives and reflect the myths and memories that live in the land. During her six years of practice at the Seattle-based landscape architecture firm GGN, she worked on urban-scale projects across the country, including San Francisco’s India Basin Shoreline Park and its Equitable Development Plan framework; Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood Green Plaza; and Milwaukee’s Public Museum. Through this work, Cox explored how both the process and product of landscape architecture can deepen relationships between communities and their places. Cox brings a range of experiences in the worlds of publishing, curation, and design activism to her practice and research, including ongoing research on African American cultural landscapes in St. Louis. Her writing has been published in Places Journal and City Lab, among other venues, and she has taught in the landscape architecture program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, as well as at Project Link, a program that connects Boston-area high schoolers from underrepresented communities to a studio-based summer design course. She has lectured widely and is currently the Places critic-in-residence in landscape architecture. In addition, Cox served on Seattle’s inaugural Central District Design Review Board and as urban design commissioner on the Seattle Design Commission, reviewing all city capital-improvement projects.

Vanessa Grossman is joining the faculty in the Department of Architecture as an assistant professor beginning with the 2023–2024 Academic Year. Her work addresses the intersections of architecture with ideology, housing and governments, with a special focus on local and global practices in Cold War-era Europe and Latin America. Her research and teaching interests include postwar French architecture and politics, the urban and housing histories of Europe, Latin America and the Amazon Forest, intersectionality and the politics of climate change, architectural exhibitions and archives. Grossman is currently completing the manuscript of her next book, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, which examines how political communism and architectural modernism became mutually reinforcing ideologies during France's Fifth Republic and found fertile ground in the French cities of the former industrial suburbs, the banlieues. She is the co-editor of Everyday Matters: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture and AUA, une architecture de l'engagement, 1960–1985. She is also the co-author of Oscar Niemeyer en France: Un exil créatif and the author of Le PCF a changé! Niemeyer et le siège du Parti Communiste. She has curated exhibitions in venues worldwide, notably at the Centro Cultural São Paulo, the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine in Paris, São Paulo’s Sesc 24 de Maio, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. She co-curated the exhibition Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha, which is on view at Casa da Arquitectura (Portuguese Center for Architecture) through February 25, 2024, and will be accompanied by a forthcoming exhibition catalog. Prior to joining the Weitzman faculty, Grossman was an assistant professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at Delft University of Technology. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture at ETH Zurich, and has also taught at Princeton University, the National School of Architecture of Versailles, and the University of Miami.

Academic appointments are subject to review and approval by the School, provost, and the Board of Trustees.