The College of Environmental Design announced that internationally recognized architect, urbanist, and scholar Nicholas de Monchaux has been named the new William W. Wurster Dean of the College of Environmental Design (CED), starting July 2027.
ITS affiliate and current Department of City and Regional Planning Chair Daniel Chatman has been named interim dean from July 1, 2026- June 30, 2027, following the retirement of Renee Y. Chow.
Daniel Chatman’s research examines how transportation systems and land use jointly shape travel behavior, economic opportunity, and urban equity, with a focus on policies that are intended to reduce driving and increase the use of sustainable travel modes.
He is best known for empirical studies that disentangle built environment effects from residential self-selection, evaluations of congestion-priced parking and transit-oriented development programs, recent work on ride-hailing and pandemic-era transit use, and efforts by California state agencies to estimate how affordable housing developments reduce vehicle miles traveled.
Using survey experiments, quasi-experimental designs, and policy evaluation, his research seeks to demonstrate whether and under what conditions state and local transportation and land use policies perform as intended, increasing social welfare and equity, or inadvertently reducing them.
Before joining UC Berkeley's College of Environmental Design in the Department of City & Regional Planning, Chatman was an assistant professor of urban planning and policy and director of the Alan M. Voorhees Transportation Center at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. He earned his PhD in Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, his Master of Public Policy at Harvard University and his BA at University of California, Berkeley.
On July 1, 2027, de Monchaux will take the reins at CED. He 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. De Monchaux was professor of architecture and urban design at UC Berkeley from 2006 to 2019.
De Monchaux's creative and intellectual interests align with UC Berkeley’s forward-looking ethos and its global leadership in innovation, technology, and entrepreneurship.
“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.” The appointment was made after a competitive open search.
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 the college 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.”
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.
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 exhibit 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.
Bio
Nicholas de Monchaux received his BA in architecture with distinction from Yale and his MArch from Princeton. He 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. He is an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute.
He was professor of architecture and urban design at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design from 2006 to 2019. 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.
His 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. He is Fellow of the American Academy in Rome.
About the College of Environmental Design
UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design — the top-ranked public school in the U.S. for architecture and the built environment (2026 QS World University Rankings) — is UC Berkeley’s home for research, innovation, practice, and theory focused on the built environment. Housing the Departments of Architecture, City & Regional Planning, and Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, as well as the Institute of Urban & Regional Development, the college is an interdisciplinary creative community dedicated to design excellence, climate solutions, equity and social justice, and developing new materials and technologies. The College of Environmental Design upholds UC Berkeley’s public mission: enhancing society and the greater good through research and design and providing pathways to success for students from all backgrounds. ced.berkeley.edu