Nicholas de Monchaux appointed dean of the College of Environmental Design
Nicholas de Monchaux, a visionary thinker about the intersections of design, technology, and society, tapped to lead CED into its next era.
The College of Environmental Design is delighted to share the news that internationally recognized architect, urbanist, and scholar Nicholas de Monchaux has been named the new William W. Wurster Dean. De Monchaux is currently head of the Department of Architecture at MIT, where he is Weber-Shaughness professor of architecture, professor of urban studies and planning, and affiliated faculty with the program in Science, Technology and Society. This is a return to UC Berkeley for de Monchaux, who was professor of architecture and urban design at CED from 2006 to 2019.
Announced today by UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Ben Hermalin, the appointment was made after a competitive open search. De Monchaux will be the thirteenth dean to lead the college since its founding by William W. Wurster in 1959.
“De Monchaux will further CED’s position as a global leader in addressing today’s environmental and social challenges,” wrote Lyons and Hermalin in their announcement. “His broad experience, interdisciplinary vision, and commitment to advancing design education will help elevate CED’s global influence and public impact across the Bay Area and beyond.”
— Chancellor Rich Lyons and Executive Vice Chancellor & Provost Benjamin Hermalin
De Monchaux received his BA in architecture with distinction from Yale and his MArch from Princeton. At MIT, de Monchaux co-founded the Local Code Lab to continue research in digital urbanism he started while at Berkeley. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. While on the UC Berkeley faculty, he served as director of the Berkeley Center for New Media (BCNM) and was named Craigslist Distinguished Chair in New Media. He is a partner in the interdisciplinary practice modem; earlier in his career, he was a designer with Diller Scofidio + Renfro in New York and Michael Hopkins & Partners in London. He is Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
De Monchaux’s creative and intellectual interests align with UC Berkeley’s forward-looking ethos and its global leadership in innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship. Fascinated by the relationships between technology and urbanism, digital simulation and world-building, sci-fi and architecture, de Monchaux is renowned as a visionary thinker about design and its relationship to society.
As an academic leader at Berkeley and MIT, he helped build new relationships and programs in design (including Berkeley’s Master of Design program and MIT’s new Morningside Academy for Design), created impactful new models connecting design and research in the built environment, and helped support groundbreaking research on climate, resilience, and cities.
“CED powerfully shaped every way in which I think about design and its responsibility in the world,” says de Monchaux. “I am thrilled to return to CED and support its mission at a time when it has never been more relevant. From the role of building in driving our climate crisis, through the role of construction, policy and planning in stewarding resilient landscapes and institutions, to the urgent task of ensuring access to cities, housing, and education across the world, CED addresses the great challenges of our time. I can’t wait to support the college as it reinvents and strengthens its impact.”
Thinking through technology: De Monchaux’s research and practice from spacesuits to cities
De Monchaux’s first book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), is a multilayered exploration into the origin of the Apollo spacesuit that brings together a remarkable range of deeply researched strands — among them cybernetics, the establishment of the military-industrial complex, and Dior’s “New Look” — to consider how material culture mediates between space and the body. It earned the Eugene Emme Award from the American Astronautical Society and was shortlisted for the Art Book Prize.
His most recent publication resonates with this earlier work: “Some Movements of Models: Simulation from Mechanism to Information, 1914–1977” dives into the UC Berkeley origins of the special effects developed for Star Wars — in CED’s own Environmental Simulation Lab — and examines the lessons of historical simulation mechanisms for transforming the relationship between simulated and real experiences.
De Monchaux also leverages technology in his approach to designing cities for social and climate resilience. His 2016 book, Local Code: 3,659 Proposals about Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press), presents a series of case studies at the intersection of digital urbanism, community resilience, and environmental justice: data-driven design interventions for vacant urban land reveal these spaces as untapped social and ecological resources. He has translated this investigation into on-the-ground collaborations with communities in the U.S. and Mexico, including ongoing work with Green City Force, a job training and urban agriculture nonprofit serving New York City public housing communities.
Last summer, as a collateral event of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, de Monchaux co-curated with Ana Miljački an exhibition that invited visitors to discover the multiple ways architectural researchers are navigating intersections of the planetary, technological, social, and climactic. Part of a collaborative exhibition at Berggruen Arts&Culture Palazzo Diedo, Climate Objects: Un/worlding the Planet highlighted the work-in-progress of 37 MIT faculty who are inventing techniques, structures, and modes of thinking engaging the climate crisis.
—Nicholas de Monchaux
This creative and scholarly work has received support from the Norman B. Leventhal Cities Prize, MacDowell, the Santa Fe Institute, the Smithsonian Institution, the Hellman Fund, and the Bakar Spark Fund. De Monchaux has exhibited his design work widely, including at the Biennial of the Americas, the Venice Architecture Biennale, The Lisbon Architecture Triennial, SFMOMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
De Monchaux’s term as dean of the College of Environmental Design will begin on July 1, 2027. Professor Daniel G. Chatman, chair of the Department of City & Regional Planning, will serve as interim dean beginning July 1, 2026, following the retirement of Renee Y. Chow.
“When the College of Environmental Design’s founding dean William Wurster came to Berkeley from MIT, he and Catherine Bauer Wurster joined a remarkable community in building something rare — a shared conversation, dedicated to the highest level of design, planning, and research, and to a holistic and collaborative approach to our built environment,” de Monchaux says. “It is an honor to return to CED and continue to elevate its founding vision and purpose.”