info
Casa Tamarindo is a design house that asks what vernacular means at the galactic scale.
Based between Mexico City and Las Californias, the studio works across architecture, biodesign, art, and culture. The practice brings two scales into the same space: site-specific vernacular materials — kelp, soil, cactus, beer waste, fog — and 21st century advanced fabrication tools that exist as a result of humanity working together at a planetary scale. Heat-pressed seaweed. CNC-milled earth. 3D printed biomaterials. The work is a question about what regional intelligence becomes when extended with 21st century planetary tools, and what planetary tools become when grounded in site-specific traditions and matter.
The house takes its name from the tamarind: a fruit with a global history that traveled from Africa to India to Mexico, and became, over centuries of adoption, one of Mexico's most iconic cultural flavors. The name holds the practice's central focus — how the global becomes local, and how the local is always already global.
practice
The studio works across four domains.
Architecture — buildings, interiors, bathhouses, retreats, pavilions, and public projects. Bioclimatic logic and material specificity are treated as cosmological questions, not technical ones.
Biodesign — ongoing biomaterial platforms grown from waste streams, invasive species, and the matter of specific regions: beer-spent grain, kelp, cactus, lacustrine assemblies, mineral soils. The studio develops, tests, and builds with these materials at object, interior, and architectural scale.
Art — sculpture, installations, and public commissions. The practice was founded by an artist, and art remains its most direct register.
Objects — furniture, products, and editions, often emerging from the studio's biodesign research.
Work moves between the domains. A biomaterial developed in research becomes the envelope of a building. A building's construction logic becomes a sculpture. A sculpture becomes a product. The studio treats each domain as a vehicle for the same question.
founder
Casa Tamarindo was founded in 2017 by Itamar Lilienthal (Ita) — an artist, biodesigner, and architect trained at New York University (BFA, Studio Art, sculpture) and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (MArch, Bio-Integrated Design). Before founding the studio, he worked at MycoWorks on the development of mycelium-based leather, and as workshop manager at Otherlab. He maintains a parallel artistic practice; the studio's work and his own are mutually formative.
exhibitions
- 2025Design Week Mexico × Audi Pavilion — commissioned design and build, Mexico City
- 2024Hold Fast: Seaweed Exhibition — Birch Aquarium, La Jolla
- 2023Beernacular vol. 2 — Apple, Covent Garden, London
- 2023London Festival of Architecture — group exhibition, London
- 2019Solo exhibition — Swish Projects, San Diego
- 2018Solo exhibition — basileIE Gallery, San Diego
lectures & teaching
- 2026Guest tutor on biomaterials — IBERO, Puebla
- 2026Beernacular Vol. 5 — Colegio de la Frontera Norte, Tijuana
- 2026Seaweed Biomaterials Workshop — San Diego CIty College. San Diego
- 2026Seaweed Biomaterials Workshop — Pasadena Art Center, Los Angeles
- 2025Beernacular Vol. 4 — Mingei International Museum, San Diego
- 2024Beernacular Vol. 3 — Tijuana Design Week, TIjuana
- 2023Lecture on vernacular design — Royal College of Art, London
- 2023Guest tutor — Industrial Design Program, Tecnológico de Monterrey
- 2022Lecture on fog harvesting — Escuela Libre de Arquitectura, Tijuana
- 2021Seaweed Biomaterials Workshop — San Diego Design Week, San Diego
press & publications
- 2026Lo-TEK: Water — Julia Watson — Itamar Lilienthal, contributing researcher (yakhchāl chapter)
- 2026Podcast Interview — KPBS Port of Entry
- 2026Podcast Interview — Slow Baja
- 2021EARTH to San Diego — Casa Tamarindo - Published with Patagonia + ARTS
- 2019Chicana Stardust Expose — Remezcla
- 2018Radio Interview — KCRW Design + Architecture
awards
- 2021SPACE10 — Positive Water Futures residency
clients
Apple, Patagonia, BMW Foundation, ProtoTown, Audi, Ayeka Integrative Center, Raveena, Roberto Rivera, Mingei International Museum.
For commissions, collaborations, exhibitions, and research inquiries, write to hola@tamarindo.house
Mexico City · Las Californias