For a discipline whose concern is space and place, architecture has yet to robustly engage new developments in digital mapping. From ever-more detailed data and new, digitally augmented realities to fissures in virtual territory that mirror real-world divides, the opportunities and challenges of this transformation are enormous. However—especially in the avant-garde—our engagement with information reinforces traditional architectural boundaries. The ability for new, place-based data to better connect us to larger systems, and seek to influence them for the better, is left, as yet, underexplored. Local Code aims to engage these shifts, and help realize their transformative potential. To this end, it proposes two kinds of devices: the first, a set of relevant concepts and texts; and the second, devices of physical machinery and architectural software. Joined in the projected volume, they aim to cultivate a hybrid of theory, technical engagement, and practical application that represents both the tradition, and necessary future, of architecture and the city.

Nicholas de Monchaux is an architect, urban designer, and theorist. In addition to 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 the Graham-funded book 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 and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize. de Monchaux's design work has been exhibited at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas, the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, San Francisco's SPUR, and SFMOMA. He received his BA (with distinction) in architecture from Yale University, and his MArch from Princeton University. Prior to his academic career, he worked as a designer for Michael Hopkins & Partners in London, and Diller, Scofidio + Renfro in New York.