Rick Joy, Tiny Homes & Packrats | Arizona Illustrated

This week on Arizona Illustrated… explore the personal home and offices of architect Rick Joy and lighting designer Claudia Kappl-Joy; Tucson’s Poet Laureate reads ‘This is What You Are’; a tiny home community provides shelter for trans women of Color and Packrat middens provide an unlikely window into Southern Arizona’s past. Rick and Claudia Architect Rick Joy is based in Tucson but has worked on projects around the globe. His minimalist, refined style defies expectations or classification but always seeks to reflect the environment it is situated in. He met lighting designer and now wife, Claudia Kappl-Joy, while working on a luxury hotel in southern Utah. In this story, the talented couple takes us on a tour of their own private offices and home. This is what you are by TC Tolbert TC Tolbert is a nationally certified EMT, and often identifies as a trans and genderqueer feminist, collaborator, dancer, and poet. S/he holds an MFA from the University of Arizona, and is the author of Gephyromania (Ahsahta Press, 2014), five chapbooks of poetry, and is coeditor with Trace Peterson of Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2013). Tolbert is the recipient of an Arizona Commission on the Arts Individual Artist Award. In 2019, s/he was the guest editor for Poem-a-Day in January and was named an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Tolbert is currently the poet laureate of Tucson, Arizona, where s/he lives. Tiny Homes: The Outlaw Project The Outlaw Project was founded to mitigate the dire circumstances that frequently affect transgendered people of color. To ensure the rights and health of BIPOC Trans Women and sex workers, they are building transitional housing which helps provide emergency housing, economic justice, self-sufficiency; harm reduction and mitigates the impact of oppression. Packrat Time Machine To many, packrats are a nuisance. But to the scientists that study their piles of waste called middens, they are a key to understanding the past. Thanks to their affinity for collecting everything around them, and their urine, which crystalizes and preserves anything trapped inside it, we can recreate past environments. These strange “time machines” enable us to see over fifty thousand years back and inform us that things have changed a lot in that time. One remarkable discovery, made thanks to our packrat friends, is that not long ago, the Sonoran Desert wasn’t a desert at all.