One of America’s most remarkable and idiosyncratic works of architecture is for sale. The Steel House, a four-legged organism of blackened metal perched on a ridge outside of Lubbock, was recently placed on the market for $1.75 million.
The biomorphic house was built by hand over more than three decades by artist Robert Bruno, who died of cancer in 2008, having yet to finish it. He lived in it only briefly, in the final months of his life, and it has remained a vacant and deteriorating local icon ever since. Completing it was never a priority for Bruno. “I’m not particularly concerned about having a house,” he said in a video filmed not long before his death. “I built it because I like doing sculpture.”
Bruno estimated the weight of the house, which he assembled from salvaged pieces of Cor-Ten steel, at 110 tons — making it a target purely for its material value. Its three levels of rooms spill into each other, with bulbous windows looking out over a recreational lake.
The house has flummoxed preservationists concerned about its gradual degradation and the possibility that it might be destroyed. In 2015, Bruno’s daughter, Christina, told The News that she wanted it to “stay in the family,” a decision that has apparently reversed. The $1.75 million price tag far exceeds any other property in its Ransom Canyon neighborhood. “This house deserves a benefactor or foundation who might give it the care and attention it deserves. Its loss to the real estate market would be incomprehensible and tragic,” says Mark Gunderson, an architect who was a student and friend of Bruno.
