From Texas Standard:
On the edge of a ravine in the suburbs of Lubbock, Robert Bruno’s “Steel House” stands out. It looks a bit like a rusted steel spaceship on four spindly legs. Bruno worked on the house for more than three decades until his death in 2008. The house has been empty since then. Now it’s for sale.
Mark Lamster, architecture critic for the Dallas Morning News, spoke to Texas Standard about Bruno’s work and the future of the house. Listen to the interview in the audio player above or read the transcript below.
This interview has been edited slightly for the sake of clarity.
Texas Standard: Can you describe where the house is and what it looks like?
Mark Lamster: It’s on the cliff of a ridge in Ransom Canyon, a kind of suburb of Lubbock. And the Ransom Canyon is located around a kind of recreational lake that was created by human hands. And the house has that fabulous view down on that lake. And you approach the house from this curved, suburban style street with very conventional houses. And then, all of a sudden, as you round the bend and reach the top of this hill, you see this extraordinary chunk of steel of a house, this biomorphic masterpiece that sits there on four spindly legs and looms over the canyon.
When did Bruno start building this house?
Bruno started working on it in the early 1970s. At that time, he became a faculty member at Texas Tech at the School of Architecture. He wasn’t really an architect; he was there to teach art, and he would get rich independently by his own ingenuity too. His wife was interested in environmental protection and worked for the local water authority. And it was for her that he invented this type of irrigation valve that became very popular in Texas and the Southwest, and the little company he and his wife started to sell it had become very, very successful.
So that gave him the ability to basically just do what he wanted, and he wanted to build a house by hand. And that’s what he did. It was really a sculpture that he worked on for 30 years until his death in 2008.
He lived in the house only a few months before his death, although construction was still ongoing. Do we know anything about these few months?
Bruno only lived there for the very last few months of his life at this point. He had cancer and I believe he wanted to see the house for as long as possible at the end of his life. But it was never really about having a house. The house has always been an artistic sculptural project so it was never completed. Many of the rooms are incomplete and unfinished. So it was really hardly a house, even if he lived in it.
Why is this a piece of architecture worth looking into?
First of all, it is an extraordinary artistic achievement and a work of simply immense individuality – great individuality and care and creativity. And it’s amazing, it has a unique and really attractive presence and it really is an icon of its time. It is an icon of the area with a long history of being both a tourist magnet and a magnet for the community.
But it’s also a really important finding of its time in the 1970s and beyond. But this idea of biomorphic architecture in the West kind of dates back to the 1970s. And I think there’s something incredibly pure and beautiful about it, and the innocence and ingenuity with which it was created.
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