emarks, the church is a “masterfully designed space” whose carefully controlled light is “crucial to the creation of a meditative space.”
He also delighted in the early churches of New Mexico, which inspired one of his last projects, the 1953 St. Michael’s and All Angels Episcopal Church on Wilmot Road. The architect even dipped into art moderne and Art Deco, and toward the end of his life, he cranked out long, low-slung contemporary ranches for Country Club Estates.
His international background partly accounts for his eclecticism. Born in Zurich in 1895, Joesler studied “architecture in Bern, engineering in Heidelberg, and history and drawing at the Sorbonne in Paris,” Jeffery writes.
His European training is especially evident in his lovely drawings, which are one of the principal pleasures of this show. The St. Philip’s renderings, in color, are particularly fine, with the church decisively etched, and the craggy Catalinas rising up beyond the roofline. (The show includes, for painful contrast, a computer drawing, of the kind standard in today’s architecture. The old-time architect’s variable lines, created by the human hand, have given way to the computer’s rigid and standardized strokes.)
Joesler soaked up influences wherever he went; he traveled throughout Europe, visited North Africa and Spain, and lived in Havana and Mexico City before landing in Los Angeles and then Tucson. His wife, Natividad, was from Spain’s Basque country, and his fluent Spanish endeared him to workers in Tucson.
His elegant floor plans for the Catalina houses—complete with instructions for those workers on niches, woodwork and the like—sketch out the lifestyles of the rich of the 1930s and 1940s. They almost invariably include a maid’s quarters—a tiny bedroom and bath—but the kitchens are small by today’s standards. The houses were marketed as winter retreats, and the maid was doing the cooking, anyway.
All of them are splendidly open to the outdoors, with patios and covered terraces. Site plans show how carefully he situated them on the land. Unfortunately, many of their sightlines have been destroyed in recent years, when deed restrictions expired and allowed new buildings on the generously proportioned Murphey lots. The older houses are relatively modest by comparison to today’s palaces of conspicuous consumption, the notable exception being Joesler’s Grace Mansion, a 15,000-square-foot white-pillared fantasy made for a shipping heiress.
The architect also designed plenty of small homes, particularly in Sam Hughes, where he made two-bedroom, one-bath houses on spec, in what might be called Pueblo Bungalow style. And in addition to his churches, he tried his hand at a variety of public and commercial projects. The show has drawings for his 1941 Ghost Ranch on Miracle Mile, for a more modest motor court on South Stone Avenue, and for a proposed school for the Catalina foothills, all of them graced by attention to air and light.
There’s even a drawing of an exuberant gas station, apparently never constructed. It’s a tri-part building with a grand tile-topped central block flanked by side structures whose rooflines careen crazily downward like wings. More suited to an airport than an earthbound service station, this little gem seems ready to soar, into the sky and over the city that Joesler built.