Founder, Endure
Josh Boehm
Josh Boehm reads systems the same way whether the system is an organization or a place, through the structure and the incentives that produce the outcome rather than the account the system gives of itself.
Josh was homeschooled on a farm in rural Minnesota, started an automotive repair business there as a teenager, then went to Minneapolis for degrees in architectural drafting and construction management from Dunwoody College of Technology. He spent a summer on residential forensics, in the field, watching how buildings fail and writing it up.
Five years of federal work followed. A Friday call put him in Cheyenne that Monday, on a ground-up police station that had gone sideways, for the Wyoming Air National Guard, and he stayed to close it out, working between the field and the office. Another Friday call sent him to a Corps of Engineers project at a military installation, on quality control, safety and project management. On an 1840s farmhouse in the Virginia countryside, the feds had put latex over solid masonry. Another problem to solve, with no water or power on site.
Across those years he reconstructed how the organization he worked inside actually functioned, from its own operating record, some of it on live jobs and some looking back after the fact. He traced where the money went and why, and he was accurate. None of it had been asked for and he had no authority to act on most of it, so the reading sat.
The first house he designed he kept as complicated as possible. A badly built 1990s ranch moved onto a new ICF basement in a greenfield development, exterior insulation and triple pane windows in, and then the facade drawn to a neo-Victorian after the windows were already set, out of roughly ninety percent commodity material with the siding courses laid to land at the window sill. The overroof corrects what the original roof did to the insulation, carries the overhang past the oversized fascia, and holds a Doric order. It is the last piece to execute.
Most recently, another Friday call and another state by Monday: a commercial ground-up build taken over mid-foundation as superintendent of record, behind schedule, with the previous superintendent gone. He ran the trade coordination and the inspections and documented every failure and every possible improvement, from the sequencing of a single trade to what the prototype itself should do differently at the next store.
He reads code and contracts as someone who has had to build to them and make the numbers work, which is the difference between knowing a rule exists and knowing what it costs.
Networks
He is a founding committee member of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art Minnesota chapter, co-founder of the Emerging New Urbanists Twin Cities chapter, and a core volunteer behind Strong Towns Fargo. He belongs to the Incremental Development Alliance and has taken part in NEVO and the last three national gatherings of the Congress for the New Urbanism and Strong Towns.
Endure is a diagnose, design, and execute practice. The diagnostic comes first, because nothing built on a wrong read survives contact with the real system.