Vanessa Grossman

Vanessa Grossman is an architect, historian, and curator. Her work addresses the intersections of architecture with ideology, housing and governments, with a special focus on 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. She is currently completing the manuscript of her next book, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France, 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. She is the co-editor of Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha (fall 2023), Everyday Matters: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture (2021) and AUA, une architecture de l’engagement, 1960–1985 (2015). She is also the co-author of Oscar Niemeyer en France. Un exil créatif (2021) and the author of Le PCF a changé! Niemeyer et le siège du Parti Communiste (2013) and A arquitetura e o urbanismo revisitados pela Internacional Situacionista (2006). 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. More recently she has been appointed co-curator of Constructed Geographies: Paulo Mendes da Rocha (May 2023–February 2024) at Casa da Arquitectura, in Portugal, which is accompanied by a forthcoming exhibition catalog. In addition, she has been appointed Review Editor for Exhibitions at the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (2023–2026) and she is a member of the editorial board of Manifest: A Journal of the Americas.

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. She held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. She has also taught at Princeton University School of Architecture, the National School of Architecture of Versailles and the University of Miami School of Architecture and the Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design. She holds a BA from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo, a MA in the history of architecture from Paris-1 Panthéon-Sorbonne Department of Art and Archaeology, and a MA and PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University School of Architecture.

Grossman was the recipient of the 2015 Carter Manny Award for doctoral dissertation writing from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Her research has also been supported by subventions from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications from Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology, Grants to Individuals from the Graham Foundation, the Chateaubriand Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, a Doctoral Exchange Fellowship from Sciences Po Paris, a Lassen Fellowship and other subventions from the Princeton University Program in Latin American Studies, a Collection Research Grant from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, a Bourse Master Île-de-France, an Award for Scientific Publication and a Scientific Initiation Scholarship from the São Paulo Research Foundation.