The Architectural League Prize 2015
Endemic
Clark Thenhaus
Clark Thenhaus founded design research office Endemic in Ann Arbor, MI in 2010 with a particular interest in “the strange relationships between context and architectural forms as a social and cultural practice of design.”
In his League Prize lecture, titled “Spheres, Cones, & Cylinders,” Thenhaus explains his efforts to “reclaim the commonplace, the familiar, and the banal as curiosities” in an exploration of traditional forms of representation and “primitive geometries.” His project Poor Forms, a series of cast models, seeks the disjunction or destabilization of form by exploring the threshold between recognizable geometries and new compositional relationships.
Thenhaus then illustrates a series of projects that explore contextual re-authorship and re-imagine specific plan types, organizations, or typologies. The Belvedere & Berms explores the belvedere building type as a composition of spheres, cones, and cylinders on the site of an abandoned missile silo in Wyoming. In A Project Four Domes Nowhere in the Middle, Thenhaus’s work on display in the League Prize exhibition, the four pieces all borrow their form from an existing dome (such as the Hagia Sophia) but distort or abstract that archetype in a new material — shingles, patina, stripes, and gilded — that questions the age of the dome.
For more information, visit archleague.org/LP15
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