Nicholas de Monchaux

Nicholas de Monchaux (born July 30, 1973) is a designer and author, and currently Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT.[1] He was formerly Professor of Architecture and Urban Design in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley[2] and Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media.[3]

de Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo,[4] a cultural, physical, and intellectual history of the Apollo A7L spacesuit; the book was winner of the Eugene Emme Astronautical Literature Award[5] and shortlisted for the Author's Club Art Book (Sir Banister Fletcher) Prize.[6] In 2016, he published Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities,[7] which combines several historical essays on urbanism, computing, and complexity with 3,659 designs for micro-scaled ecological interventions in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Venice. This work earned praise from The New York Times for its "intelligent enquiry and actionable theorizing,"[8] and was exhibited at the Biennial of the Americas,[9] the Venice Architecture Biennale,[10] The Lisbon Architecture Triennial,[11] and SFMOMA.[12]

In 2012, de Monchaux was named as one of the "Public Interest Design 100."[13] He is a former fellow of the American Academy in Rome.[14]