Tucked behind a fence in a quiet South Austin neighborhood, a 35-foot tower built from roughly 60 tons of scrap metal, rubber, concrete and glass has been rising for nearly four decades — and it is still growing. The Cathedral of Junk, the sprawling backyard sculpture at the center of artist Vince Hannemann’s property, remains open to the public strictly by appointment, with visitors calling ahead to schedule a walk-through of a structure that started as a pile of hubcaps and became an Austin institution.
Hannemann began building what would become the Cathedral of Junk in 1988, then moved to Austin from Santa Fe, New Mexico, in 1989, according to The Independent. He had built backyard sculptures since childhood and studied architecture for one semester before landing in Central Texas, where he started showing the project to the public in the early 1990s. The structure sits at 4422 Lareina Drive in a residential South Austin neighborhood, according to Visit Austin.
What began as individual backyard sculptures — hubcaps nailed to a fence starting in 1989 — eventually merged into a single connected fortress. Hannemann originally called the evolving project “Yardspace Eleven” in 1992, before his mother gave it the name that stuck: the Cathedral of Junk, according to the SPACES Archives. Discarded bicycles are now woven into the structure’s multi-story framework, per the same account.
What Visitors Actually Find Inside
The Cathedral includes a domed room that stands nearly three stories tall, a second story that can hold roughly six to eight people, and a top sitting area for about three or four more, per The Independent’s reporting. Old tires, light fixtures and whirlybirds have been fashioned into a pyramid-like shape, and dozens of glass bottles are embedded in partial cement walls throughout the structure. Hannemann told The Independent he’s still collecting: “Skis, crutches — I think I’ve got enough shopping carts finally,” he said, describing the kinds of donated junk that keep finding their way into the build…