Sculptor turns metal scraps into home that pays homage to modern architecture

By Mark Lamster

The Dallas Morning News

CROSS TIMBERS, Texas — About an hour north of downtown Dallas, in the woody hills of the Cross Timbers ecoregion, the sculptor George Tobolowsky has erected one of the more eccentric works of residential architecture in Texas, a loving — some might say bizarre — fusion of modern architectural icons assembled out of recycled material, much of it salvaged during the remaking of the RedBird Mall, an abandoned retail center in southern Dallas.

The “Recycled Glass House,” as Tobolowsky calls it, joins Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House (edithfarnsworthhouse.org), built in 1951 in Plano, Ill., and Philip Johnson’s Glass House (theglasshouse.org), built in 1949 in New Canaan, Conn. Though they share a common visual language and scale, these two homes make for decidedly strange bedfellows. The Farnsworth House is white, asymmetrical and lifted off the ground, while the Glass House is black, symmetrical and tied directly to the earth.

Mies, for his part, did not care for Johnson’s Glass House — he compared it to a roadside hot dog stand — and was especially irritated that it was inspired by the Farnsworth House yet flouted that building’s design principles and was completed first, stealing some of Mies’ thunder. (Johnson had studied the Farnsworth plans while curating a 1947 exhibition of Mies’ work for the Museum of Modern Art.)

Putting unlikely things together is a staple of Tobolowsky’s artistic practice. His sculptures typically combine bits of discarded scrap into compositions that land somewhere between the organic and the mechanical. Jed Morse, the chief curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center, has called him “a connoisseur of unwanted metal” and has celebrated him for his ability to transform disparate fragments “from utilitarian to transcendent, prosaic to poetic.”

Tobolowsky came late to sculpture, at least as a profession. He studied law and accounting at Southern Methodist University before embarking on a successful business career in which he opened nearly 100 franchise video stores and tanning salons. If his name is familiar, it is probably because his cousin is veteran Hollywood character actor Stephen Tobolowsky.

When he did turn to sculpture, in his mid-50s, it was not entirely out of the blue. As an undergraduate at SMU, he studied the subject with the assemblage artist James Surls, who would become a lifelong friend. A formative experience as a student came in 1974, when, for $3.50 an hour, he helped install an exhibition on the work of Louise Nevelson at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, in Fair Park. Nevelson’s work, mysterious compositions of salvaged objects set in black wooden frames, spiked his own interest in transforming discarded material into art.

“Every day I had lunch with her, and I would talk to her about her art and about found objects,” says Tobolowsky. When he went off to earn a graduate degree in tax law at New York University, he became a regular guest at the artist’s downtown studio. “I would go visit her whenever I had a chance,” he says.

The pairing seems improbable — the aspiring young tax lawyer and the severe, inscrutable artist — but to know Tobolowsky is to understand why Nevelson took a shine to him. With a thick brush mustache and a can-do spirit, Tobolowsky radiates a sense of enthusiasm that is at once endearing and infectious.

The genesis of the Recycled Glass House came in 2019 when Tobolowsky learned that sections of RedBird Mall would be demolished as part of its redevelopment into a mixed-use center with retail, housing and medical facilities. Peter Brodsky, the mall’s chief executive, was a family friend and patron, with a Tobolowsky sculpture on the lawn of his residence.

“I really think he’s a creative genius,” says Brodsky. “I love the idea of taking old metal scraps that are twisted, that are mangled, that are otherwise going to be thrown away, and turning them into something beautiful.”

Tobolowsky was happy for the material — much of it from a Sears that was being repurposed into an outpost of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center — regardless of its condition. “By the time he hung up his phone, I was there with my trailer,” Tobolowsky says. In the months following, he picked up some 100,000 pounds of steel, mostly in the form of I- and H-beams. What he didn’t use, he sold as scrap.

The timing was fortunate. When Tobolowsky learned of the RedBird demolition, he was considering a getaway house on his family’s 57-acre property in Valley View, land purchased in the 1980s after he heard about the Army Corps of Engineers plan to build the reservoir Lake Ray Roberts.

“I could see where all the new roads were going to be, all the new state highways and county highways, so we bought a couple of hundred acres up there,” he says. Though only an hour north of Dallas, the area looks nothing like the city’s flat and sunbaked landscape. There are rolling hills, sandstone outcroppings and dense forests of oak, mesquite and elm trees. In the years since the acquisition, sections of that property were sold off, including a plot with a large log house Tobolowsky built for the family. (It is now home to a former lineman for the Dallas Cowboys.)

With the steel from RedBird and a ready plot of land, Tobolowsky was left to imagine what a house constructed of recycled metal might look like. “For some reason, I just Googled steel buildings, and of course Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House and Philip Johnson’s Glass House popped up.”

With that inspiration, he began sketching a rough design that would unite those two disparate works. “The Farnworth House is the core,” he says. “Then I plugged half of a Phillip Johnson house on each side of it as bedrooms.” A sloping site allowed him to have things both ways: part of the house is elevated on piers, as at the Farnsworth; other sections sit on the ground, as at Johnson’s Glass House. All of the steel is painted a matte black, to blend into the woody surroundings.

Construction began during the COVID-19 pandemic, in November 2020, and continued though May 2024. The house’s formal opening came nearly 75 years to the day after the debut of Johnson’s New Canaan Glass House.

Tobolowsky did have some professional design help in the person of Bruce Bernbaum, a partner at the Dallas architecture firm Bernbaum/Magadini, who describes himself as Tobolowsky’s “assistant.”

“He’ll have a vision. Sometimes we agree on those things, sometimes we don’t,” says Bernbaum. “On this project my goal was to keep him out of trouble.”

One of those difficulties was figuring out how to square the minimal and highly refined designs of Mies and Johnson with the raw and sometimes deformed materials salvaged from RedBird.

In some areas, Tobolowsky chose not to hide those imperfections, but to celebrate them, placing them in strategic locations — framing the front door, for instance — where they would be immediately visible, his idea being to “remind you that this is recycled material.”

In other places, the salvaged beams lead to undeniably crude results. One can only imagine what Mies (who famously proclaimed that “God is in the details”) or Johnson (who was persnickety in his own right) might have thought of the rather clunky resolution of the building’s corners — always tricky in a glass building.

The interiors are handled with more finesse. Floors of white oak (recycled from Kansas) lend a bright, Scandinavian feel, with internal walls of black walnut from Oklahoma, planed at a local sawmill in which Tobolowsky is an investor. One of those logs, sliced in half, was turned into a bench, now in the house’s central foyer. Recessed lighting that runs along a soffit below the ceiling is not something Mies or Johnson would have done, though it is well disguised.

The walls are decorated with Tobolowsky’s collection of rare Texas maps and with his sculptures, including a spectacular piece composed of 25 chrome-plated hubcaps that hangs in the master bedroom.

It is, of course, easy to question the wisdom of joining a pair of philosophically opposed masterworks into something new, not to mention the decision to build a house with all-glass exterior walls in Texas. (For the record, it is shaded by surrounding trees and well ventilated.) Are there moments that will make architectural dogmatists cringe? Absolutely.

But, really, who cares?

The house is best judged on its own terms, and understood in that way it is a work of indisputable charm, a feat of invention that unapologetically reclaims the past while creating something with its own idiosyncratic poetry.