Living at the Intersection of Manmade and Natural Systems
Nicholas de Monchaux is Head of Architecture at MIT. He is also a professor of architecture and a professor of urban studies and planning.
It all started with a knot. Or, many knots. As a child, Nicholas de Monchaux was captivated by the fleet of ferries shuttling across the harbor near his home in Sydney, Australia. “When I was young, my heart’s desire was to be the guy who tied up the ferry to the dock,” de Monchaux deadpans. “I loved water, I loved the city, and I loved knots.” This is the beginning of an explanation about his lifelong fascination with the intersection of manmade and natural systems. Even if he didn’t end up working on the harbor.
Surrounded by books, face framed by tortoise shell eyeglasses, de Monchaux sits in his office on the third floor of Building 7, where the MIT Architecture Department has been located since 1933. Soon, though, he and his department will have a new home on the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street in what was once the Metropolitan Storage Warehouse. Since arriving on campus in 2020, De Monchaux has been deeply involved with the design of the Metropolitan Warehouse project. The renovation of this landmark building is a testament to de Monchaux and the Institute’s commitment to reusing materials, recycling, and repurposing resources as means of adapting to the future.
“One of the most important facts about architecture today is that the construction and maintenance of buildings produces around 38 percent of greenhouse gases contributing to global warming,” says de Monchaux. “We need to radically rethink how buildings are made. Not least because, given the global expansion of population, we are predicted to build as many buildings in the next 40 years as we have in the last 10,000 years.”
De Monchaux believes that part of his charge as Head of Architecture at MIT is to challenge our traditional understanding of architecture. “At MIT, we ask students to think about a building, not as a singular object but as an intervention in an urban system, as an intervention in an ecological system—with a deep ethical obligation to be a driver of positive change in all the systems that it is connected to. If you think about a building as a catalyst and not an object, you get to a very different idea of what architecture is in the world today.”
On a professional social media site that provides space for a short biographical summary, de Monchaux obliges, begrudgingly, cramming a career’s worth of accolades and accomplishments into a tight space: Impressive roles at MIT and UC Berkeley, three well-received books, design work featured at the Biennial of the Americas, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Lisbon Architecture Triennial, SFMOMA, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He ends with a single-lined paragraph; a caveat: “He remains unconvinced of the merits of short biographical summaries.”
Still, he indulges me as we embark on a 1,000-word snapshot of his life and career. Trained as an architect at Yale and Princeton, he plied his trade at firms in London and New York before accepting an appointment in the architecture department at the University of Virginia. Several years later, he was again living in a city by the sea, where he would happily tether himself for the next 14 years. At UC Berkeley, he was the Craigslist Distinguished Professor of New Media, Professor of Architecture and Urban Design. When he recites the full title, he chuckles. A wry smile pushes his cheeks upward, and he squints from behind his glasses. He is a bit of a rascal.
Like a stone skipping backwards across the surface of time, de Monchaux touches on his days as a graduate student at Princeton. This is when the Apollo space program—specifically, the space suit—first reared its head as a subject worth exploring. He was surprised to find that very little had been written about it from a design perspective. Interest became obsession, and he spent the next several years researching and writing about the topic, culminating on the page in his first book. Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011) won the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and was shortlisted for the Art Book Prize.
Like its inspiration, Spacesuit is composed of 21 “layers” (rather than chapters)—a nod to the “…21 layers of fabric, most gossamer-thin…,” as De Monchaux writes, that “…stood between the skin of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and the lethal desolation of a lunar vacuum.”
The suit, says de Monchaux, is “…an object at the intersection between technological systems and the system of the human body—and it has essential qualities in common with each of those systems.” His research served as a launchpad for de Monchaux to explore ideas of resilience, redundancy, and the importance of designing in concert with natural systems; the big ideas that he brings to life at the scale of buildings, cities, and ecologies.
It is worth noting that in his current profile picture on the aforementioned social media site, de Monchaux smiles broadly from behind the gold-coated visor of an A7L spacesuit helmet. Further proof that his brand of appreciation has not waned, his architecture practice (modem ) presented an exhibit called Space/Suit at the 2021 Venice Biennale and a related installation called Ascents: Events: Implements at the 2025 Biennale.
While working at UC Berkeley, he began a project called “Local Code.” It was a speculative study of 1,500 sites that were owned but not maintained by the city of San Francisco. With a team of students, de Monchaux demonstrated that by maintaining these sites and using them for stormwater retention, the city could save billions of dollars in upgrades and modifications to the sewer system. Buoyed by his findings, de Monchaux explored what it would mean to apply the concept in cities across the United States. He published his findings in Local Code: 3,659 Proposals on Data, Design and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016).
If we think of all the ways in which a city works and all of its networks of natural and manmade systems, we have a very powerful ability to make more resilient cities, to make more sustainable cities as well.
“Looking at how 1,500 micro interventions in the city could aggregate to produce a really powerful effect is an important snapshot of how I think about urban design, cities, and networks. They are organisms in their own way,” says de Monchaux. If we think of all the ways in which a city works and all of its networks of natural and manmade systems, we have a very powerful ability to make more resilient cities, to make more sustainable cities as well.”
In 2020, de Monchaux launched the Local Code Lab at MIT, where he and a team of urbanists, researchers, and architects work to invent radically distributed approaches to urban transformation and the collaborative tools to make these strategies possible. Recently, they partnered with MIT’s Urban Risk Lab and New York City’s Green City Force on an urban greening project focused on New York City’s vast public housing network.
“Architecture is a powerful agent of change in the world,” says de Monchaux. “But I think the practice of architecture has to change, and I believe that my work as head of the Architecture Department at MIT is incredibly important because it brings together this enormous history of architectural practice in North America that MIT is a catalyst of.” He cites the Institute’s pioneering role in the invention of the first computer-aided design system, the first computer numerical control system, and the first prefabricated plastic house, among other things. “My hope is that this department can be a real agent of change in the practice of architecture today,” says de Monchaux.