Nicholas de Monchaux

Nicholas de Monchaux

STS Affiliate Faculty; Professor and Head of Architecture, MIT

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Nicholas de Monchaux is Professor and Head of Architecture at MIT. He is a partner in the architecture practice modem, and a founder of the design technology company, Local Software. Until 2020 he was Professor of Architecture and UrbanDesign, and Craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media at UC Berkeley.

De Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize, as well as Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016).

In 2012 he was named one of the “Public Interest Design 100” byGood Magazine. His design work has been exhibited widely, including at the Biennial of the Americas, the Venice Architecture Biennale, The Lisbon Architecture Triennial, SFMOMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, theStorefront for Art and Architecture and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.His work has been supported by MacDowell, the Santa Fe Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hellman Fund, and the Bakar Spark Fund. He is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Recent Books

2011

Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo

Nicholas de Monchaux

How the twenty-one-layer Apollo spacesuit, made by Playtex, was a triumph of intimacy over engineering.
When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they…