Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect and urbanist, whose work examines the intersections nature, technology, and the city.

He is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an Architectural history of the Apollo 11 Spacesuit.

de Monchaux received his B.A. with distinction in Architecture, from Yale, and his Professional Degree (M.Arch.) from Princeton . He has worked as a designer for Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro in New York. Until 2006, he was Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UC Berkeley.

de Monchaux's work has been published and reviewed in Log, Architectural Design, the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and have been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. His design work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas. He has received design awards and citations from the International Union of Architects, Pamphlet Architecture, and the Van Alen Institute, who awarded him the 2000 John Dinkeloo Memorial Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.

He lives with his wife and son in Downtown Oakland.
 

(2003-2011) Initiated as a public lecture at the Santa Fe Institute in 2003, Spacesuit (MIT Press, Feb 2011) is an architectural history of the Apollo AL7 Pressure Garment, manufactured by the industrial division of the Playtex Bra and Girdle company, against stiff opposition from hard, one-piece suits much beloved of designers.

More information, news, and excerpts at fashioningapollo.com

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Finalist in the WPA 2.0 competition sponsored by UCLA Citylab

Proposal Location : Major US Cities with city-owned abandoned lots, including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington DC. Case study developed for San Francisco.

Local Code : Real Estates uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites in major US cities, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as a new urban system. Using parametric design, a landscape proposal for each site is tailored to local conditions, optimizing thermal and hydrological performance to enhance the whole city’s ecology—and relieving burdens on existing infrastructure. Local Code’s quantifiable effects on energy usage and stormwater remediation eradicate the need for more expensive, yet invisible, sewer and electrical upgrades. In addition, the project uses citizen participation to conceive a new, more public infrastructure as well —a robust network of urban greenways with tangible benefits to the health and safety of every citizen.

Local Code on Vimeo

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Local Code : Real Estates was one of four architectural projects selected for the Biennial of the Americas in July of 2010.
The installation was used to extend the Local Code project (discussed below) into the realm of fabrication.
More than two hundred models of proposals for leftover space in San Francisco were cnc-milled from abandoned lumber, lasercut and etched to form part of a 600 ft2 installation landscape of steel, recycled wood, and video projection.

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A proposal for the Atlantic City Boardwalk Holocaust Memorial, With Elijah Huge and Andrew Shanken.

This proposal for a memorial was used to test the interaction between two very different modes of digital simulation. The first, a physics simulator, was used to cast up and disperse planks that formed the memorial’s dispersing cloud. The second, a tensegrity modeler, allowed the form of this cloud to be best approximated with a self-supporting tensegrity structure.

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A window on a larger, multi-year research on the ecology and form of Venice, Brodo di Pesce is a singular representation of a multi-layered, complex system; the city and its supporting lagoon. Conveying geospatial data in the form of a soup-bowl, the piece illustrates both the depths of the city’s current ecological crisis, as well as the piece-by-piece (spoon by spoon) strategy that must be employed for its resolution. (with Kathryn Moll)
 

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A heavily linked text (and not just in the sense of sausage), Meatropolis examines the shared history of meat and the city. It was written in 2006 for the art magazine Meatpaper and you can read the full article on their website here.
 

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Competition Entry, 2006 : With Thomas de Monchaux
The expanded public library in Stockholm can be imagined as an addition to the Observatory Hill. Any conventional architectural extension, reproduction, or attachment to the original Asplund building would, we believe, trivialize the perfection and simplicity of its geometry, symmetry, and presence as an urban landmark. Instead, we have been inspired by the natural landscape that Asplund, with Glemme, designed as the building’s setting: the reflecting pond, hillside stream, plantings and earthworks that provided the frame and setting for the iconic building. The addition refines this frame and setting, rather than a new distracting building. It draws on precedents in Asplund’s own work, in which landforms and landscapes are composed in careful choreography and sympathy with more visible architecture. It is inspired also by the unique landscape and geography of Stockholm at a larger scale, by the monumental presence of Stockholmsasen, visible at Observatorielunden and stretching South as part of a glaciofluvial archipeligo of eskers and inlets, hills and islands that together define the geology and ecology of the city. The addition celebrates this essential element of this urban geology and ecology.

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A collaboration with Julie Bargmann‘s Dirt Studio, Process = Place was commissioned by the New York Times Magazine as a landscape memorial to the events of September 11, 2001. Alongside more traditional proposals, we proposed not a garden, but a process, in which a tree farm on the Fresh Kills site would, once a year, contribute saplings to the many neighbourhoods in New York touched by the day’s tragedy.

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What if cities saw olympic-scaled events as a strategic stimulus, and not stagecraft? This design research project at the University of Virginia School of Architecture looked at radical possibilities for urban renovation brought about by the (then active) Olympic bid’s potential. (student image).

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(with Thomas de Monchaux). Our cities are defined by two types of architecture; that which is seen as permanent, and therefore subject to a range of conservative pressures, and that which is seen as temporary, and therefore given spatial, and conceptual license. Yet our experience of the city is defined by a regular upending of this relationship; that which is seen as permanent, is often not — and that which is “temporary” regularly defines our long-term experience of the city. A Pamphlet Architecture Finalist.
 

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What if the spaces and capacities of urban infrastructure were seen as a shared resource? As machines, or, to use a onetime synonym, organs, of urban robustness? This research project at the University of Virginia School of Architecture looked at new possibilities of urban life afforeded by a sophiscated understanding of a city’s dense supporting structures (student image, Meredith Miller).
 

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The classical history of Athens, with its ideas about home, place, and contingency, is rarely brought to bear on the ecological and economic problems of the modern metropolis. Instead of adding to contemporary nostalgia, however, the project uses Athens history as inspiration for a self-sufficient, temporary Olympic village, which does not add to the citys overstock of housing, nor drain its overextended resources. After the games, the well-appointed rooms follow the paths of triremes to the harbors and inlets of the Aegean islands, becoming a moving stock of tourist housing whose shifts accommodate the seasonal changes in travel patterns, providing temporary relief to local resources. The idea follows Themostocles’ advice, given in Thucidydes’ account of the Pelloponnesian war; “if ever [Athenians] should be hard-pressed on land, they should take to their ships.”
_Winner, Han Heun Kim Prize, UIA 2002 International Competition “Architecture + Water”

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The events of September 11, 2001 forced the Newman Popiashvili Gallery into a series of temporary spaces, whose interiors were designed by Nicholas & Thomas de Monchaux. For a time, thanks to a donated hotel room, the gallery was known as “Suite 106.”

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A set of Grasshopper components that allow the import and export of Rhino files, as well the reading of attributes embedded in Rhino geometry.

Download: LocalCode.gha

Video tutorials can be found here:
Installation
Local Code Export
Local Code Import
Local Code Import/Export Loop

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