Events

Join us for the launch of Dr. Vanessa Grossman’s new book, A Concrete Alliance: Communism and Modern Architecture in Postwar France. Concrete Alliance examines the massive reshaping of French cities that took place between 1958 and 1981, an episode commonly regarded as a unique time in which modernist ideals were tested on an unprecedented scale. Yet the history of postwar French modernism has never fully accounted for the influence of one of architecture’s most important institutional patrons, the French Communist Party (PCF). Drawing political theory and architectural history into conversation, Vanessa Grossman probes the shifting but enduring alliance between modern architecture and the PCF in the aftermath of the political crisis of 1958, prompted by the Algerian War of... Read More

Jessica Oublié is the author of Tropiques Toxiques, recently translated into English as Toxic Tropics. Toxic Tropics a documentary comic book about the chlordecone scandal in Guadeloupe and Martinique, in which France purchased and used a pesticide that had been banned in the US because of health concerns. Today, people from both islands suffer from exorbitant rates of cancer. To make matters worse, the chemical is estimated to stay in the soil for hundreds of years. Oublié’s book bears witness to the ramifications (personal, financial, agricultural, legal) of this environmental disaster.