 their indoor-outdoor spaces took advantage of the mild winter climate, their courtyards, colonnades and screened Arizona rooms drawing on centuries-old principles of design for hot climates. He prized craftsmanship, and employed local Mexican artisans to weld old-style ironwork for the windows and to carve lintels and ceiling beams.
And unlike the slash-and-burn developers of today, who pile on the pink tile and scrape the land bare, Joesler and the Murpheys exactingly preserved the gorgeous vegetation of the desert.
A summer show at Special Collections in the UA Main Library, Josias Joesler: Tucson Architect is a brisk and engaging précis of his career. Mounted in celebration of a library project to digitize the Joesler materials held in the university’s Arizona Architectural Archives, the exhibition—counter-intuitively—showcases several dozen of Joesler’s beautiful architectural drawings. Also on view are some photos and old-time tools of the architect’s trade—T-squares, protractors and the like.
Curated by librarian Paula Wolfe and two UA students, Megan Maureen Wedel and Niamh Wallace, the exhibition includes a learned text by R. Brooks Jeffery that outlines Joesler’s contributions. Director of the Drachman Institute at the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Jeffery is the author of Joesler and Murphey: An Architectural Legacy for Tucson.
Joesler, Jeffery writes, was an “architectural linguist,” fluent in multiple styles. Before he conjured up the Old California fantasies in the Catalina foothills, he designed dozens of turreted Tudors and Swiss chalets in the center of town, at Campbell Avenue and Elm Street. (Most of the grand houses in this project, called the Old World Addition, were demolished in the 1970s to make way for the University Medical Center.)
He borrowed church designs from the old Kino missions in northern Sonora, translating their humble shapes and materials into the exquisite St. Philip’s in the Hills Episcopal Church at River Road and Campbell Avenue. As Jeffery rightly remarks, 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 o