Grossman Earns College Art Association Award for Mendes De Rocha Study

Each year, the College Art Association (CAA) honors outstanding achievements in visual arts and art scholarship with its Awards for Distinction recipients. CAA recently announced that Assistant Professor of Architecture Vanessa Grossman received the Alfred H. Barr Jr. Award for Smaller Museums, Libraries, Collections, and Exhibitions for Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha (Yale University Press, 2024).

Constructed Geographies is the first major publication on the visionary Brazilian architect since the establishment of his archive at Portugal’s Casa da Arquitectura in 2021, and centers around twelve of his most important buildings.

Grossman shares the honor with her mentor, the late French architect and architectural historian Jean-Louis Cohen, who co-edited the publication. The book accompanied a major retrospective at Casa de Arquitectura in 2023.

In an interview discussing Mendes da Rocha’s legacy, Grossman described the issues at the core of his practice, which the project sought to amplify: “How can you design a private home when people live in favelas? How can you design a lively city when the riverbanks become highways, its waters are so polluted and the traffic doesn't move? How can we turn back the destiny of rivers and think of a fluvial metropolis?” The project focuses on his work as both an architect and a thinker, “mediating between modern utopia and contemporary culture,” Grossman explains.

Grossman is also the author of A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, an account of the significant relationship between communism and modern architecture in postwar France.