When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the lunar surface on July 21, 1969, the spacesuits they were wearing were made, not by any of the sprawling, military-industrial conglomerates who had forged the hard surfaces of their rockets or capsules, but rather by the International Latex Corporation, best known by its consumer brand, “Playtex.” The victory of Playtex over the military-industrial establishment, and the soft, 21-layer suit that trumped hard, system-designed prototypes, is only one of the many stresses and strains that characterized the rapid effort to insert soft, human beings into military-industrial machinery originally intended for warheads, and nuclear destruction. And while it may seem—at least initially—that the process of designing for human beings is a less high-stakes enterprise than the summit of the Cold War, many of the seemingly otherworldly lessons of man, and technology, on the moon, remain urgent examples for our machines, cities, and ecologies today
About
Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect and urbanist whose work explores the intersections between 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 a B.A. with distinction in Architecture, from Yale, and his 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. The work of his Oakland-based design studio has been exhibited widely, including at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas and SFMOMA, and will be featured in the US Pavillion of the 13th Venice Architecture Bienalle in fall 2012. 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.
