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Tucson, AZ
Desert Digismith
[digital] + [authentic material craftsmanship]
[digital] + [authentic material craftsmanship]
Harnessing the potential of technology while seeking to preserve the craft of the vernacular.
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Mission:
Architecture and all other aspects of the built environment are truly comprehensive vehicles with which to affect places and ultimately people. Architecture is one of the few disciplines that is technical, analytical, and artistic. It affords the ability to oversee with meticulous detail but also preserve, sustain, and transform at a much larger scale. Because of this great responsibility and opportunity, we, the architects, builders, designers, and artists, strive to harness the potential of technology while seeking to preserve the craft of the vernacular.
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History:
Roshelle Stahl founded Desert Digismith in July 2019 immediately after returning from the Camino De Santiago [Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port to Santiago de Compostela]. She graduated from the University of Arizona in 2015 with a Bachelor of Architecture degree. In 2012, she began working at an architecture firm while in her second year of architecture school.
Beginning to work on Design Build projects and exposure to various forms of material fabrication while in school, inspired her to take on her own design build project in the historic Barrio Viejo of Tucson, AZ while simultaneously working on her capstone project for her final year of architecture school. This project would later become known as Casa Limón Tucson and was the catalyst of
Desert Digismith.
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Roshelle is a licensed architect in the state of Arizona and an NCIDQ certified interior designer.
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Roshelle Stahl and Marlon Brando "The Dogfather" at Parker Canyon Lake, AZ
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Philosophy:
“... architecture is the only profession capable of equal concern for world hunger and door closers.”
- Leonard Bachman
Truly successful architecture decentralizes resources and finds efficiencies in overlapping elements of complex systems. It creates sustainable framework that starts at a macro level (people are creatures of convenience), and inspires individual responsibility and belonging. Above all, it remembers where it is and who is there.
Truly thoughtful and successful design must uphold and respect the vernacular on all possible levels while acknowledging and harnessing the very same technology that is often responsible for globalization. People should not walk through a homogeneous and anonymous world where they themselves become anonymous.
Genius loci contributes to genius ipsum: A sense of place contributes to a sense of self.
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Bachman, Leonard R.. “1.” In Integrated buildings the systems basis of architecture. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. 6. Thwaites, Kevin, and Alice Mathers. “3 Beyond Boundaries.” In Socially restorative urbanism: the theory, process and practice of experiemics. New York, NY: Routledge, 2013. 58.