Architecture Professor of Practice Takes Arizona Daily Star Readers on a Southern Arizona Road Trip

“There is a place in Baja Arizona that rests in my memory and daydreams, more as a passage than an arrival to a specified destination,” writes Jesús Edmundo Robles Jr in a November 5 Arizona Daily Star editorial. “A confluence of history, cultures, landscapes, biomes and folklore. It is as much defined by the roads, trails and stories that lead you from the Tucson basin into the valleys and high desert grasslands of the Madrean Archipelago.”

Robles, an architecture assistant professor of practice at the University of Arizona’s College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, takes the reader along for a ride in his trusty pickup truck as part of the newspaper’s “Favorite Places” series. Robles narrates the spare beauty of the 80-mile drive on the two-lane road between the Santa Rita and Whetstone Mountains, though Sonoita, and into the Patagonia Mountains.

Enjoy the drive with Robles via the Arizona Daily Star or watch the video:

Robles, who joined CAPLA in 2013, is a principal at DUST Architects, an award-winning studio grounded firmly in the tactile, in pursuit of the intangible. The studio, as well as his teaching at UArizona, explore ideas and ethics rooted in a reverent intimacy with craft and place through endeavors into the essential and the timeless.