Josias Joesler


Josias Thomas Joesler was a Swiss-American Tucson, Arizona architect.

Life and work

Joesler was born in 1895 in Zurich, his architectural legacy would come to articulate the romantic revival Tucson style of the first half of the 20th century. Educated in Germany and France, he lived in Spain before moving on the new New World, living and working in Havana, Cuba, Mexico City and Los Angeles, California. Joesler married his wife Natividad and the two moved to Tucson in 1927.
His major surviving commercial architectural buildings are spread throughout the historic Tucson core. Extant buildings are clustered along the Fourth Avenue shopping district and the Broadway Village Shopping center on the corner of Country Club and Broadway. Other major commercial buildings include the Saint Philips Church and Plaza at Campbell and River Road, St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church at 5th and Wilmot and The Ghost Ranch Lodge on Miracle Mile.
Many of his residential buildings are in the Catalina Foothills Estates and in the Historic Blennman-Elm Neighborhood, listed in the National Register of Historic Places. His buildings utilized traditional southwestern hand crafted decorative motifs including: hand applied plaster, hand hewn beams, colored concrete floors and decorative iron/tin work.
Joesler died in Tucson on 12 February 1956. Natividad Joesler died in Spain June 23, 1963.
Note: According to historian David Leighton, of the Arizona Daily Star newspaper, Joesler Village on North Campbell Avenue and East River Road, in Tucson, Arizona, is named in his honor and there is a small street in the Sam Hughes Neighborhood that bears his name.

Extant Buildings

All buildings located in Tucson unless otherwise noted.