(Tom) This week on Arizona Illustrated, world-renowned architect Rick Joy and lighting designer Claudia Kappl-Joy share their personal spaces with us.

(Claudia) This house caught our attention.

We loved it because of its elevation, because of its location, but I would say mostly the light.

Like, wow, that's it.

(Tom) Our collaboration with the Poetry Center continues with a poem by Tucson Poet Laureate TC Tolbert.

(TC Tolbert) I've learned to flinch by standing absolutely still.

(Tom) Discover how tiny homes are being used to help marginalized communities.

(TC Tolbert) The beauty of this project is when we decided what kind of house we would build, we were building it with the idea of working in community.

(Tom) And crystallized rat urine provides scientists an unlikely view of our past.

(Camille) So we can identify things, often to species and sometimes even subspecies, because of the exquisite preservation of the plant fossils within the middens.

Hello and welcome to Arizona Illustrated.

I'm Tom McNamara.

Back in 2022 at the annual Museum of Contemporary Art Gala, architect Rick Joy and lighting designer Claudia Kappl-Joy were handed the local Genius Award, which recognizes visionary Tucsonans whose work has had a global impact.

So next, this internationally recognized couple takes us on a tour of their personal offices and home.

(Rick) I designed with the narrative quite a lot.

You open the gate and it squeaks a little bit, and then you come in and you hear the dripping water and then the ground crunches under your feet.

You have to negotiate nature, so you have to duck a little bit.

That's intentional.

I was told by my high school guidance counselor that I would be good at air traffic control or architecture.

I always had architecture on the back of my mind because I used to sit at the kitchen table.

My father was a printer.

He'd bring home these big, long sheets of paper, and I'd put them on the kitchen table and I would draw underground cities with people and cars and lights and all that kind of stuff.

That all came naturally.

But I didn't put it all together until I was 27 in art school.

People started noticing when I did the first rammed earth project.

The world just came unglued because they'd never heard of it before.

Even though it's thousands of years old.

When you think about it, the rammed earth that you guys have been photographing, is plaster.

It's sand, aggregate and water and a little clay and all the stuff that is stucco that you see on all these buildings.

Like, why put another layer on it when the whole wall is made out of the same stuff?

The material just basically took me by the back of the collar and said, You're going to do this for a while.

My client kept wanting to put a house on that site.

His name was Rick, too.

No, please Rick.

Nobody's going to want to live there and come down that alley and go in their front door.

Can't do it.

So he called me one Sunday night and he said, Rick, I got an idea.

How about if we build you a new studio right there?

And I'm like, okay.

And so that was a Sunday night.

Monday.

I designed it.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I did the CDs.

And Monday I was digging.

And he's like, Why are you going so fast?

And I'm like, Rick, I was just afraid your medication was going to wear off and I wouldn't be able to actually really do this.

And so we did it.

It's really great because they're working in architecture.

(Tofan) I discovered his work in my first year in architecture school.

It just clicked with me and my my sensibilities, I guess, and.

And I wanted to learn from him, basically.

His work is beautiful and so pragmatic and to the point that it's poetic.

(Rick) The idea was to have the sun come from the South, hit that wall and bounce back into the room.

And so we can have a rammed earth building with no lights on during the day.

On that and wall of the bathroom is glass, translucent glass.

That blue light on the ceiling indicates that no one's in the bathroom.

So you don't have to keep walking down there and checking to see if it's open like that.

Daylight comes through that skylight at the end at noon.

It's lunchtime, guys.

See the light?

(Tofan) It's easy to get complicated in architecture and design in general.

To kind of rein that back, you know, the complexity, rein it back into something pure and simple.

And that's really about the space and about the space around it as well.

It's difficult and challenging.

(Rick) The diversity is just amazing for our firm.

Right now, I think two thirds of the office are from other countries.

And I learned so much from them.

And so it's a give and take.

They learn from me.

I learn from them.

It's a real learning studio.

(Claudia) Architecture, I studied at one of the technical universities in Austria during my final thesis project.

I realized that I was particularly interested in atmosphere and didn't know enough about lightning, which pushed me towards an additional, occasionally a lighting design.

I went into a bookstore in Graz and there was Rick's first book.

And I was just moved to my core and I'm like, this is exactly what fascinates me about architecture.

It grounds you in an environment and it's always reduced to the essence of what it needs to be and nothing else.

What I obviously had no clue about is that a few years later I would go visit these buildings that were documented and described in this book.

(Rick) If you look at our first book Desert Works, I pretty much did all that lighting myself and it's not that good.

When Amangiri came along, we hired a lighting designer from Stockholm.

The only one we could find that was working through the qualities of atmosphere versus just light fixtures.

(Claudia) Lighting being an ephemeral medium, you sometimes can't quite grasp it, but it has the power to have an emotional impact.

(Rick) Claudia was the main person on a bunch of projects.

The lighting design quality is just so superior.

(Claudia) We always had a really great way of connecting, and it was apparent to everyone who worked with us that there was just a wavelength, maybe a way that we could communicate, and then we became romantically involved.

When I actually joined Rick here in Tucson, my rule was, I'm not going to work for you or with you.

We said like, well, maybe, you know, we managed to do this before, so why don't we try again?

And then it worked out pretty well.

We are currently in my studio that I co-found with Rick nine years ago.

It's called CLL, Concept Lighting Lab.

(Rick) Somehow she's right on the cusp of the knowledge for lighting design, and I never see her studying.

I don't know how she knows it.

(Claudia) Very often you will hear people not talk about good lighting.

People will usually point out when lighting is lacking, when there is not enough, when it's glaring when it's good, it's just accepted.

We are in a historic building.

From 1900, it's an adobe structure now painted white.

So there's a lot of general bounce in the space because of our proximity to the street.

We have a film on our windows that diffuses the light.

Then we have these few skylights, adding another quality at a different level.

Everyone has a task light, which is the most essential light for working.

And then we have indirect uplight, which comes from the floor or from the ground, and was a conscious choice to be respectful with the historic structure.

We try our lighting to be more in the background, just doing its thing without calling attention or without calling too much attention.

Let's say that.

[bell chimes] We're at home.

Tucson, Arizona (Rick) and West University neighborhood right up the street from Time Market.

This house caught our attention that we we weren't sure if it was in our reach.

We loved it because of its elevation, because of its location.

But I would say mostly the light.

We're like, Wow, that's it, that's that's it.

(Rick) We stripped it down to its bones and then just started redoing all the infrastructure.

(Claudia) For ten months straight.

(Rick) There were some periods where we just couldn't wait to get here after work.

You know.

(Claudia) You make it yours by the process of working on it.

(Rick) I don't like trims on anything.

Also, no grills for the AC, so we invented our own way of doing it.

Those are rules from all of our projects.

Could even see we're using tomato cans for recessed cans as a joke and fun and the color is amazing.

(Claudia) It's a coming together or a coming apart through these processes.

For us, it was a really fun, creative way of just feeling very aligned, just really own the corners, the detail.

(Rick) We don't get to do the work that we do in the office without us being like that.

There's moments where I like to celebrate the imperfections, but the rest of it has to be perfect.

Now we bring you something a little different for Arizona Illustrated.

We have teamed up with the Poetry Center to bring you a series of poems written by local poets and then visualized by producers on our team.

This next poem called "This Is What You Are" is written and performed by local Poet Laureate TC Tolbert.

[sound of vinyl record crackling] This is what you are missing Melissa - [vaguely melodic drone sound track throughout] dust turned to waves in the desert - [sound of dry desert wind] okra coming up [sound of okra growing] two months too late - a forward breaking gate [sound of gate creaking open] opening into someone else's field - I walk by a window and I don't understand how little I see you but so clearly the wasp [sound of buzzing] backing out of a hole inside a long dead tree - [sound of wood being pulled from itself and breaking] when we were children we lived with our grandparents and I remember without sadness mostly [distant sound of tires] the sound of tires screeching into the street - the porch light welcomes whatever intercepts it - I praise insistence - I kiss my love because our best friend died when we were five years old - a brain tumor - and then again at 7, 11, 17...43 - [blowing sound] bodies killing themselves by growing beyond their own capacity - [sound of wood-working] I am building a bed for our visitors - it is infuriating [sound of foosteps on gravel] how little I understand about re-joining wood already broken piece by piece- [sound of wood on gravel] anticipate everything I hear God saying to no one - [sound of footsteps on gravel] I am still listening when you stop, for a moment, breathing in your sleep - [sound of sleepy breaths] I am recognizable now as a part of the man who made me - every man is a suspect - inside my own mouth I am annoyed by who I cannot seem to be - do you miss this, Melissa - every part of our body is ash aching to be reminded it is ash [sound of a forest on fire] unlike fire reaching through the face of every forest In order to be incited by wind or offered some relief - I've learned to flinch [sound of gasp] by standing absolutely still - [sound of deep breath] it isn't death exactly living without you - the purpose of a rope is to borrow someone else's strength - that's why I'm calling you - when I pray I hear nothing so clearly as our new voice singe-scoured and full [sound of singed thread] of disbelief - [sound of vinyl record crackling over fading droney melody] In order to help combat a widening economic gap, members of our community, including TC Tolbert, who you just met, are finding creative ways to help provide affordable housing.

Which leads us to the Outlaw Group, local people providing tiny homes for trans Women of Color who are among the most affected by housing inequality.

We have over 60 people here on Mother's Day helping to raise the framing of the house up.

It's been like a very communal effort to build these tiny homes.

The Outlaw Project is a nonprofit that works on the intersectionality of being trans, being a cis woman, being a sex worker, being a person who, with experience houselesness.

Why we're focused directly especially trans women of color for stable housing, because they're mostly directly impacted by housing disparities.

The rate of low income housing and the need of it is went up right after COVID.

And so a lot of landlords here in Arizona raise the rent, a lot of trans women and were directly impacted by that.

The reason why we want to do this is like, hey, this is a housing program, ran by trans women for a trans woman of color.

TC is a lifesaver.

When I had purchased this property, it was not the best property.

Monica needed help rehabbing the house.

And so I stepped in to to do what I could.

And through the process of working with her, we worked together to design and bring to life the housing that will house trans women of color.

So TCs is being a great ally in utilizing their access to the world in a way that I couldn't.

And helping me make this vision come true.

Well, I'm trans and means a lot to me to be able to contribute to my broader community.

Also enjoying working with other trans folks, other queer folk, folks who are not traditionally in the trades, but feels like a true community gathering.

Today we're finishing up the roof and we are finishing sanding and essentially oiling and protecting the timbers themselves.

The beauty of this project is when we decided what kind of house we would build, we were building it with the idea of working and community in mind.

That helps not only on the financial end for us It help us keep the cost low, but it also helps us come together as a community, build skills with folks who maybe want to build skills and also just spend time together.

This is very important to create a solution to address affordable housing like this because our community needs is there's a lot of programs that say like, you have to be sober to live here.

Those rules are there to decrease the impact on the community.

But if I have a safe place, we want to provide that.

And so there is no rent charge.

It is free.

When it's time for you to transition that we can work together to find you long term housing.

And all we want you to do is focus on yourself.

And folks are not going to come here for one or two nights or even one or two weeks.

This is really a place for people, for trans women of color in particular, to come and get their feet underneath them.

The saguaros, creosote, and sunsets are all staples of the American Southwest, but recent science indicates that this desert vegetation may be newer to the area than once thought.

The discovery comes from packrat middens or crystallized packrat urine, which oddly enough contains many secrets to this area's past.

Narrator - In these boxes are hundreds of time machines.

And these time machines are powered by crystallized pack rat urine.

Camille - Pack rats are members of the genus Neotoma, and there are several different species and they exhibit what you think of as stereotypical pack rat behavior.

They collect leaves and seeds and twigs from the landscape and they bring them back and they make a nest.

They urinate on their midden, their urine is very concentrated.

It crystallizes and forms a rock hard encasing that we refer to as amberat.

It's that urine that really protects the fossils and preserves them for tens of thousands of years.

This is a 53,000 year old midden.

So this juniper seed is 53,000 years old.

This bear grass, 53,000 years.

All of the cactus spines 53,000 years old.

Julio - I spent a lot of my career studying these curious and unorthodox deposits called pack rat middens Pack rat middens were not something that people knew they could extract information about past environments secrets of the past until about 1960.

In 1960, these deposits were discovered by Phil Wells and Clive Jurgensen.

It was then that the pack rat midden method was born.

Camile - So I came down here and started working with Julio, who was my my master's and my Ph.D. advisor.

He did literally write the book and we have continued to collaborate throughout the years.

The midden is a treasure trove of plant material, and so once we collect it in the field, we'll bring it back to the lab.

Julio - The first thing you've got to do is dissolve the urine and the urine is water soluble.

Drop them into a bucket of water and let them dissolve.

Some of them take a couple of weeks to dissolve.

Camille - Then we will wet wet sieve it, we'll dry it and we're left with all of the loose plant parts.

At that point we can take a look at it under a dissecting microscope.

So we can really see the variation in the plants, so we can identify things often to species and sometimes even subspecies, because of the exquisite preservation of the plant fossils within the middens.

Julio - And so we have in these deposits these snapshots of the vegetation at a particular time over the last 50,000 years.

Camille - This is really how we know, what the past vegetation looked like.

Julio - There's some excellent examples of sort of before and after midden research started.

Basically, we thought that the Sonoran Desert, with all these plants with very curious adaptations to aridity, think of a Saguaro, think of a Palo Verde with photosynthetic bark.

People thought that those were age old adaptations that had been there for tens of millions of years, basically since the Miocene.

People thought that it more or less, you know, looked the way it does now.

We did a midden study that spanned the last 60,000 years, and in fact, we were finding junipers and pinon pine in those deposits.

In the Sonoran Desert you'd find that instead of having Saguaros and Palo Verdes and the things that you see here, you'd have woodlands.

Camille - There was a lot more moisture.

It was cooler, and it allowed these woodlands to move further down in elevation from where they are today.

Julio - the Sonoran Desert, you know, it's basically a recent development, recent meaning in the last 10,000 years or so, Camille - I was having lunch with an old friend from grad school yesterday and she was talking about trying to eradicate the pack rats from her property because of course they do cause some destruction to their lawn furniture and stuff like that.

Right.

But it's that behavior that leaves us with really this wonderful archive of the past.

I work with pee, I work with poo.

Right.

But they tell us so much.

It's really this treasure.

Before we go, next week marks Season 45 of Arizona Illustrated.

So here's a sneak peek at some of the stories we're working on.

(gentle music) I got into the process of understanding human connection with rocks.

From the vantage point of rocks, how does the world look?

I kept wanting to suspend rocks.

And I finally did it.

That was such a physically aggressive thing.

And so I left the rock part.

I brought harvested clay back in and started creating shapes that looked like rocks that were made from harvested clay.

Well, what if I just allowed the clay to just be clay?

You work so hard in the gym, I was like, I want to do more, I want to pose.

I've worked on biceps, I want to show them.

So I went into physique and learned all the poses and I just got hooked on that.

So I did that for several years and NPC, my partner, he said, hey, let's do powerlifting.

It's different, you're short, you're muscular, it's a good sport for you, let's try it.

I've been very successful with powerlifting and I'm ranked number one in the world of all time in my division.

And so right now that's what I'm doing.

I'm training for the next powerlifting nationals coming up in October.

I wanted to look at spaces where you could see human impact.

I was just looking up landfills in Tucson and I came across a map with all of these landfills and you could just see them right next to the river and I just found that really surprising.

And I figured out how to bring the material and the concepts together because the mycelium and the reishi specifically will remove heavy metals from soils and they remediate soils.

The purpose of those services is to keep people with disabilities out of institutions.

Because people are vulnerable there, they can't say what's happening to them.

And people aren't watching what's happening there very closely.

So it's literally saving lives to keep people in their homes with people who love them.

And if you can do that with the support of a caregiver part-time, it's so much less expensive than it is to put them in a home and pay for full-time care.

To try to protect HCBS, Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs included full funding for the Department of Developmental Disabilities in this year's state budget.

I have no kids myself.

I've always wanted them but never had them.

So Alexa is like the closest thing I have to having a child.

Thank you for joining us here on Arizona Illustrated and we'll see you next week when we begin an all new season.

I'm Tom McNamara, have a great week.