Concrete Alliance

Vanessa Grossman is assistant professor in the history and theory of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

“As Grossman shows, the complex, sometimes exasperating but unusually self-aware French experience of realizing Communism in architecture has much to teach us in the twenty-first century.”—Richard Williams, West 86th“Full of insights into the operations of architecture in a shifting political climate and demonstrates considerable skill in relating events that were the outcome of highly complex and ideologically charged circumstances.”—Adrian Forty, Fabrications2026 IPHS First Book Prize winner, sponsored by the International Planning History Society“A landmark book and an immensely valuable contribution to the study of the relationship between politics and architecture. Grossman has given us a pathbreaking, original analysis of the relationship between political communism and architectural modernism in France. She captures brilliantly the real achievements in design and urban planning of leftwing architects, as well as the hopes, conflicts, betrayals, and disappointments that accompanied them.”—Herrick Chapman, New York University“In Concrete Alliance, Vanessa Grossman reveals how architecture became a key terrain of political engagement, articulated in no small part through its distinctive materiality. This important work offers entirely new insights onto the postwar welfare state and the history of architecture during the Cold War.”—Sheila Crane, author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture“A Concrete Alliance magisterially demonstrates the political speech of leftist architecture in postwar France. Vanessa Grossman offers an illustrated, archive-based account of complex passions, idealism and failure and contributes to our wider understanding of Western Communist allegiances within a context of burgeoning postmodernism.”—Sarah Wilson, The Courtauld