by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

Summary: The steel house artist and sculptor Robert Bruno has created is a non-conceptual piece wholly informed by Bruno’s own aesthetic choices and direction. Its spontaneous, unplanned complexity hints at the future, the past, and (according to Bruno) calls to attention the scalar distortion and prevalence of conceptual rhetoric in modern architecture.

How do you . . . create singular, personal architecture from a non-conceptual basis?

For 33 years, Robert Bruno has meticulously designed and built his welded steel house on the edge of a canyon outside of Lubbock, Tex. But, somehow, he’s not sure how many square feet it is (his guess is 2,700) and he can’t explain the influences that have informed his design over these three decades—despite the fact that the house’s otherworldly shape seems tailor-made for free association. A brief jaunt through any design-oriented mind brings you to: an insect’s carapace, an alien spacecraft, M.C. Escher’s hallucinogenic maze-scapes, and perhaps Deconstruction’s ongoing War on the Rectangle.

But Bruno isn’t an entomologist, a science fiction writer, or even a Koolhaas/Gehry acolyte. He’s an artist, and not a conceptual one. “This house doesn’t deal with concept at all,” he says. “I’m not trying to have something re-emerge in the guise of my house.”

The medium is the meaning
In 1974, while teaching at the architecture school at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Bruno completed a large steel sculpture just tall enough to stand under. He found this space pleasing and decided that it might be nice to live in such a dwelling. This humble and guileless desire is the only impetus for the design of his richly complex house, now almost complete.

The house hitches itself to no stylistic wagons and has been spontaneously designed and revised over the course of its 33-year construction. “What you’re seeing is 33 years of design, not three months of design and 33 years of labor,” Bruno says. If he would have had to design the house in full initially and then build to this exact standard, “I would feel as if I were working for somebody else,” he says. This is a literal distinction for Bruno. He began the house when he was a young man, age 29. Today he’s 62, and the majority of his years have been spent working on the house; an open film exposure documenting his aesthetic development and intent.

Perhaps the house’s only conceptual and planning standby is its materiality. Instead of co-opting an external motif for the project and building form from there, Bruno let his materials speak with their own voice. “A lot of the shapes are helped along by the material itself, saying, ‘This is what comes naturally,’” he says. Naturally, it seems, Bruno’s house wants to express itself organically, even despite steel’s reputation as a primary tool in humankind’s arsenal of the artificial environment. Year upon year of continual revision have evolved dense, idiosyncratic curvatures and layerings that mimic the higher-ordered imperfections of life. The house reveals steel to be an organic signifier not only in form but in surface. It’s pleasingly brusque, ruddy-brown color is only the result of rust and decay. The steel has aged with Bruno, too.

“You just leave it out in the rain,” he says. “One of the things that I actually like about the material is that it does give us the sense of being another living thing that is perishable.”

The sculptor’s tools
Sited on a sloping plot in the small town of Ransom Canyon, Tex., the house’s four legs stand it up to the top of a canyon wall. It’s imprecisely ovoid shape is composed of a double shell structure, an interior and exterior shell with insulation in between. “This isn’t something draped over an interior structure,” Bruno says. “The structure is the shell.” Bruno estimates that 60 percent of the interior is made of steel, while nearly the entire exterior is steel. The vast majority of it was cut and welded on site and installed with simple tools: a wrench, welder, cutting torch, c-clamps, and a cable pulley for bending and shaping the metal.

Bruno, an artist and sculptor by trade, did have to build a few unique tools to help him in his lone quest to complete the project. One example was a hydraulic crane that he could remotely operate from the crane’s bucket. The room layouts and general size of the house were the only elements Bruno planned in advanced. Spread over three levels, the house has three bedrooms, three baths, a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room, all of which Bruno is a few months away from moving into.

“What it consists of . . . ”
And when he does, he says he expects the avant-garde dwelling to be exceedingly livable. But, without the commonplace programmatic references of furniture and interior design, those not so intimately connected to the entity’s growth and development may not feel the same way. Bruno’s house is delirious in its volumetric complexity, so much so that decorative and structural elements are nearly indistinguishable. Vertical terraces curve into stairs, a table-like structure slopes out of the floor.

Bruno says this type of spontaneous, whimsical design is what creates the aesthetic complexity people crave, missing from most of the built environment around us, and largely absent from the practice of architecture itself. “It isn’t that we’re looking for the silliness of a maze,” he says. “We’re looking at a higher order of complexity.” The crux of the problem: Market realities demand that architects communicate to clients what a project will be before it exists through imperfect, distorting mediums like models. From this point on, Bruno says the scale is manipulated and details are whitewashed in the transition. “Inadvertently, what ends up happening is that the resolution at the model level is potentially quite different from what you would resolve at full scale. I would venture to say that almost all the large buildings we see around us are the replica and the original is the model,” he says.

The subsequently full-scaled and improvisatory details of Bruno’s home make it feel somehow futuristic, full of components and volumes seemingly too complex for human comprehension, yet still ancient in its organic decomposition. It’s as if it had returned from the future to be buried in our past, stuck here for thousands of years.

Indeed, the house does take a stand against one temporal artistic signifier: conceptual art. Much of art and architecture over the past century, Bruno says, has been self-consciously concerned with shackling itself to specific ideas and concrete themes early in the planning process, making execution perfunctory and raw aesthetics secondary. It’s art where, as conceptual artist Sol LeWitt said, “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.”

Bruno uses the example of Swedish-born artist Claes Oldenburg’s giant-sized replicas of everyday objects. His projects are easy to discuss and imagine without ever seeing the actual object. “What it consists of is the wall plate and light switches made big. That’s what it is.”

Reliance on this type of design philosophy in architecture is easy to find and easier to explain. Because architects create things using clients’ money and the client wants to know what they’ll be getting, architects had better find a way to explain it. All of a sudden, a conceptual framework becomes a mandatory marketing pitch and much of modern architecture lends itself to pithy descriptions of what “it” is.

Examples of this can be seemingly traditional or recognizably Modern. The National Cathedral be can easily understood as a Gothic cathedral decorated with American history iconography, and Eero Saarinen’s Ingalls Ice Arena at Yale doesn’t lose much in translation when described as a an ice rink shaped like an upturned Viking ship.

Robert Bruno’s house doesn’t discuss these kinds of worldly concerns. It speaks only to process and materiality, which yields a summation that might read thusly: “It’s a 33-year-long exposure of a home in steel.”