(b Oran, Algeria, 24 Jan 1942). French writer, teacher and architect. He graduated in architecture (1967) from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he was introduced to urban design practice and theory by Eugène Beaudouin. At the same time, he attended Roland Barthes’s courses in linguistics at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. During the 1970s Grumbach, who was influenced by the historian Joseph Ryckwert (b 1926), devoted most of his time to theory and criticism. He published extensively in specialized reviews in France, exhibited and sold his drawings and taught at the Unité Pédagogique d’Architecture 6 in Paris, the University of Toronto and Princeton University, NJ; he also lectured throughout the world. From his typological studies of the traditional urban fabric in Paris and his participation in Rome in the international exhibition Roma Interrota (1977), he became convinced that the integration of new architectural projects within the existing urban fabric was an essential prerequisite for high-quality urban design, and he adopted a polemical and theoretical approach to architectural competitions he entered at the time, such as those for the systematization of the Place Napoléon (1975), La Roche-sur-Yon, and the development of Les Halles (1978), Paris.