Silvia Groaz

Silvia Groaz is an architect and architectural historian.

After earning a bachelor's degree from the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, she obtained a master's degree from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, then specialized in architectural history at the Bartlett School of Architecture – University College London (2015).

In 2021, she defended her PhD thesis in history and theory of architecture at EPFL, focusing on post-war architectural culture, with a particular emphasis on the historiographical construction of Brutalism, published in New Brutalism. The Invention of a Style (EPFL Press, 2023). During her PhD, she was a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York (2018). She then pursued postdoctoral studies at the Catholic University of Louvain (Belgium, 2022) and Yale University (New Haven, 2023) on the research project Sensorial Environments for a New Perception of Space. Hans Hollein between Art, Architecture and Primordial Science. In 2023, she was a resident researcher at the Swiss Institute in Milan, where she conducted research on the interior architecture of Italian architect, artist, and designer Nanda Vigo, currently in press (The Metaphysics of Everyday Life. Nanda Vigo's Interiors, Birkhäuser 2026).

She has worked in international offices such as Kühn Malvezzi (Berlin), 2A+P (Rome), Anne Holtrop (Amsterdam), and David Kohn Architects (London). Between 2020 and 2022, she is curating exhibitions at the Archizoom gallery (EPFL), where she is co-organizing interdisciplinary exhibitions such as Sometimes Doing Nothing Leads to Something (2021) and Do not Carry your Flag too Low: Actions from Matrix Feminist Design Co-operative (2022).

Her work has received support from the Getty Research Institute, the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss Institute, the Catholic University of Louvain, the Construction History Society, the Italian Council, and the Italian Ministry of Culture.

Since 2024, she has been a senior lecturer in Architectural History and Cultures (HCA) at ENSA Paris-Est and a lecturer at the University of Liège (Belgium).