Josh Espy

As his third-grade teacher can attest, Josh has a longstanding commitment to disruption.

He was the kid with both hands coated in clay before the sculpture instructor could forbid the class from beginning. A born maker, Josh learns by doing. In high school, he worked summers along the coast of Maine as a carpenter, crafting luxury homes by day and borrowing tools to create custom furniture late into the night. In the darkened workshop, musty with wood shavings, he learned to challenge precedent and search for modernity and meaning in the interaction of wood, canvas, steel, and stone. At 18, Josh completed his first building, a timber-framed cabin, all before he packed the hatchback to attend Middlebury College.

Josh combined creative writing, politics, art, and entrepreneurship with his degree in architecture, aiming to solve design problems with disruptive, cross-disciplinary ideas. He graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2017, but not before founding The Middlebury Department of Recreation, which filled the campus with custom tables, bars, experimental apparel, and a fully renovated school bus.

Josh joined Arch11 in the summer of 2017 where he continues to bring a maker’s touch and disruptor’s eye to crafting spaces, rituals, and objects that add meaning to our otherwise bewildering existence.