Spacesuit Fashioning Apollo tells the story of the twenty-one-layer spacesuit in twenty-one chapters addressing twenty-one topics relevant to the suit, the body, and the technology of the twentieth century. The book touches, among other things, on 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. Through it all, the twenty-one-layer spacesuit offers an object lesson. It tells us about redundancy and interdependence and about the distinctions between natural and man-made complexity; it teaches us to know the virtues of adaptation and to see the future as a set of possibilities rather than a scripted scenario.

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, urban designer, and theorist. As well as directing his Oakland-based design practice, he is assistant professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Berkeley. de Monchaux is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society. de Monchaux's architectural and urban design work has been exhibited at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas, the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, San Francisco's SPUR, and SFMOMA. de Monchaux received his BA with distinction in architecture, from Yale, and his professional degree (MArch) from Princeton. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a designer for Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro in New York.  de Monchaux's work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Santa Fe Institute, and the Smithsonian Institution. In 2011, he was named Michael Kalil fellow of the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design. 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.