Tucson’s most famous architect, Josias Joesler, can’t be entirely blamed for the sea of pink-tiled houses flowing out from Tucson in all directions.
But he probably did more than anyone else to bring Spanish Colonial Revival building styles—and their tile roofs—to the Old Pueblo.
Tucson’s homebuyers nowadays prize Joesler’s buildings for their old-time Tucson charm—for their arched windows, porticos, niches, ironwork and carved lintels. But these houses have almost nothing to do with the city’s own architectural history.
The first true Tucson architecture can be found in Barrio Historico, where a few blocks of 19th-century Sonoran adobe rowhouses survive south of the Tucson Convention Center. (Hundreds of other Mexican-style houses were leveled during the urban renewal of the 1960s.) These hand-built, thick-walled houses—warm in winter, cool in summer—are authentic pieces of vernacular architecture. Their homegrown style responds both to Tucson’s harsh climate and its cultural history as a northern Mexican town.
By contrast, the Swiss-born Joesler borrowed his styles from elsewhere, notably California, where Mission Revival (red tile, white facades) became all the rage after the Panama-California Exposition of San Diego in 1915. Arriving in Tucson in 1928, Joesler created undeniably romantic—but ahistoric—houses for the Old Pueblo. His best-known works, the mini-haciendas of the old Catalina Foothills Estates, were meant to attract wealthy buyers to a fairytale Southwest redolent of Spanish California.
Joesler worked in the city for nearly 30 years, mostly in partnership with developers John and Helen Murphey, designing more than 400 buildings in an astonishing array of styles. But Joesler handled his assorted revival designs—Spanish Colonial, Pueblo and Mission—so deftly that his buildings have weathered over the years into a genuine expression of Tucson.
He carefully oriented his houses in the foothills toward views of the nearby mountains and desert. To be sure, these snowbird houses were poorly insulated, but 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 r