Endemic

Clark Thenhaus founded the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based design research office in 2010. The studio’s work engages the duality of the term “endemic’s” definition: on one hand, “the traditional meaning concerning context, language, and material sensibilities as an intensely local construct,” and on the other, “as a term of the discipline itself, thus making contact with fundamental, cross-cultural conversations on technique, history, form, and process as inherent to the practice of architecture.”

Current projects include Dome On A Hill with Materials and Applications Gallery in Los Angeles and Poor Forms, a collection of models that manipulate familiar forms through geometry and composition within contemporary discourse and technologies. Past projects include The Belvedere & Berms, a conceptual building model created in collaboration, led by Clark Thenhaus, with Nate Oppenheim, Ryan Doidge, Tyler Smith, Danielle Tellez, Alexandra Bernetich, and Katie Donahue; Palindromes, exhibited at the ACSA 101 New Ecologies Constellations show hosted by California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2013; FinalFinalFinal exhibition at University of Michigan Taubman College; and The Canteen Farm House, which looks at how small, incremental insertions into existing irrigation infrastructures can improve regional food production and suggest new models of agrarian living.

Thenhaus was a 2014 MacDowell Art Colony Fellow and was named the 2013–2014 Willard A. Oberdick Fellow at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He is now Visiting Faculty at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco. He received a B.Envd from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a M.Arch from the University of Pennsylvania.