ATC Lecture: Nicholas de Monchaux - Fashioning Apollo March 14, 2011

When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped onto the lunar surface in July of 1969, they wore spacesuits made by Playtex: twenty-one layers of fabric, each with a distinct yet interrelated function, custom-sewn for them by seamstresses whose usual work was fashioning bras and girdles. This talk is the story of those spacesuits. It is a story of the Playtex Corporation's triumph over the military-industrial complex-a victory of elegant softness over engineered hardness, of adaptation over cybernetics.

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect and urbanist focused on issues of nature, technology, and the city. The lecture touches on, amongst other things, eighteenth-century androids, Christian Dior's New Look, Atlas missiles, cybernetics and cyborgs, latex, JFK's carefully cultivated image, the CBS lunar broadcast soundstage, NASA's Mission Control, and the applications of Apollo-style engineering to city planning.

Since 2006, de Monchaux has been Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in 1995, with distinction in Architecture, from Yale University, and his Professional Degree (M.Arch.) from Princeton University in 1999. De Monchaux has worked as a designer in noted architectural practices, including Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and, until 2001, Diller + Scofidio in New York. From 2001-2006 he was Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia.

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