Lecture Recap | "DUST: Origins" by DUST Architects
The American Southwest (El Norte), a region where we call home is an aesthetically powerful and storied landscape. The beauty and timelessness of this place connects us with the infinite. This land, the arid conditions, and inherent isolation preserve artifacts and monuments to creativity and human perseverance.
As we inhabit this landscape, it inhabits us; we drink from it, and in turn, it inspires us, providing us with time and space for reverie. Our reveries are filled with a sense of the familiar, of belonging. The landscape keeps us alive both physically and metaphorically.
The desert landscape is one of the sensual dimensions, memory, and aesthetic resonance, it is reflected in our perceptions, thoughts, ideologies, and our creative acts. It is through our deep learning and embodying of this place that transcends and allows us to dream of human experiences around the world.
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About DUST
DUST is a collective of creative souls firmly grounded in the tactile, in pursuit of the intangible.
The studio explores ideas and ethics rooted in a reverent intimacy with craft and place. Ideas unfold in the creative space of intersections and find form through respect for nature, cultural histories, material, and our perceptions.
The seeds of this practice were planted in the late 1990s on the vast plains of the Llano Estacado in West Texas; the studio was born in Tucson, Arizona in 2007 as a collaboration between Cade Hayes and Jesús Robles and has grown to a team of nine, providing Architecture, Planning, and Construction services.
The work stands as both a concrete marker on the landscape, and as a frame focused on the essential, where ephemeral moments can find their place in the timeless realm of memory.
The work leads in with the question, “How can we contribute to making the place more meaningful and resilient than it was?”
Cade Hayes, AIA
Founding Principal
Master of Architecture, Texas Tech University
Cade brings over 22 years of experience executing projects from master planning, hospitality, cultural, residential, and construction management to every DUST endeavor. Cade believes that great design and architecture transform our lives, shaping our perceptions through lived experiences. Driven by a passion for expanding the studio’s horizons, he explores new typologies while upholding core values: a profound sensitivity to environment and place, the poetic use of materials, and meticulous attention to detail and craft. In addition to practicing, he has led several Design Studios and Fabrication courses at the University of Arizona and Texas Tech University. He is an active member of GSA’s National Register of Peer Professionals, the Design Review Board for the City of Tucson, and is professionally registered in Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Texas and Utah.
Jesús Robles, Associate AIA
Founding Principal
Master of Architecture and Bachelor of Business, Texas Tech University
With over 20 years of experience, Jesús leads projects of varying scales and complexities from design to managing and executing their construction. Through the arts, advocacy, ecological awareness, and shared common values, he believes that it is our responsibility as architects, artists, designers, builders, thinkers, community members, and humans to consider a more equitable and just set of environments. Jesús is a licensed residential and commercial contractor in Arizona. He is also an Assistant Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona with a focus on poetics and spatial qualities reflecting cultural histories and landscapes, and is an active board member of Native Seeds SEARCH in Tucson.
