Founder, Endure

Josh Boehm

I read 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.

The method came out of nearly five years inside federal construction, across the field, the documents, and program-level delivery. The work ran across ten military installations and projects for the Corps of Engineers, GSA, and the National Park Service, from a vehicle maintenance facility at Minot Air Force Base to a GSA federal building in Bismarck to the Minuteman missile field. That is the place where the gap between what a plan says and what actually happens decides whether money is made or lost. The formal grounding under it is a degree in construction management and an architectural drafting degree from Dunwoody College, both of which trained reading physical assets through contracts, drawings, and submittals. That evidence discipline is what I used to reconstruct how a real, multi-million-dollar organization functioned from its own operating record, isolate the structural failures, and put a number on what they cost. The logic does not change with the subject. The same reading that maps a broken operation maps a development pattern or a zoning code.

My domain knowledge is deepest in the built environment. I came up through construction and architecture and engineering coordination, and I carry that into building science and the way traditional buildings actually hold up over time. I read code and contracts through the eyes of 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. The work has run from dense urban cores to rural and remote country, which is where you learn that the same rule lands differently depending on the ground it sits on.

Networks

I work in the national networks for urbanism and traditional architecture in organizing roles, not as a passive member. I am a founding member of the Institute of Classical Architecture and Art Twin Cities chapter, a founder helping run the Emerging New Urbanists Twin Cities chapter, and a core volunteer behind Strong Towns Fargo. I am a member of the Incremental Development Alliance, and I have 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.