Nicholas de Monchaux (born July 30, 1973) is a designer and author, and Professor of Architecture and Urban Design in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley.
He is currently Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media.
de Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, a cultural, physical, and intellectual history of the Apollo A7L spacesuit; the book was winner of the Eugene Emme Astronautical Literature Award and Shortlisted for the Author's Club Art Book (Sir Banister Fletcher) Prize.
In 2012 he was named as one of the "Public Interest Design 100"; In 2016 he published Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities, 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 Italy.
This work has been praised by the New York Times for its "Intelligent enquiry and actionable theorizing," and has been exhibited at the Biennial of the Americas, the Venice Architecture Biennale, The Lisbon Architecture Triennial, and SFMOMA.