Maverick architect David Sellers, who helped launch the design build movement, created a community of like-minded innovators near the small town of Warren, Virginia, and passed away in Los Angeles on February 9th. He was 86 years old.
Sellers visited his son Parker Sellers in California, working in the home he designed with, promoting concrete housing in the aftermath of a recent fire. His daughter, Trillium Rose, said he died in hospital from complications of heart disease.
In 1965, Mr. Sellers and Yale School of Architecture, William Reinke had the radical idea that if the structure was built by an architect designed by a structure, it would have made it even better. They felt that improvisation and experimentation could make the architecture more functional and beautiful, rather than planning drawings and blueprints in advance. Speculating that no one would bankroll two untrained architectural students, they searched for cheap land where they could build a vacation home on speculation.
After being laughed at by Fire Island, they headed to Vermont after being told that they were 75 years too late for such an effort. There, the farmers sold 425 acres in Mud River Valley near Sugar Bush and Mud River Glen Ski Resort. They each paid a down payment of $1,000. After sitting on the raspberry bushes, they began building, salute the wounds their friends had suffered, giving names to the spiny pile.
After paying the down payment they were almost broken, but local businesses let them buy the materials and food with confidence. They saved the labor. The seller ordered Yale students to spend the summer working in the warm mountains in exchange for food, accommodation and $500.
At the time, Vermont was a welcome place for those looking for utopia. Back in Lander, they built a commune and established a food cooperative. There were no building codes or inspectors, and the house that began to gush out into the spiny mountains was a unicorn. It incorporates a fascinating group of new forms and ideas, green energy technologies such as passive solar design and wind.
“Are you ready?” Progressive Architecture magazine wrote in 1966. “Two sawns just outside Yale Architecture have a project called Prickly Mountain. And they are working as entrepreneurs, land speculators, contractors and craftsmen, architects, and defeating the establishment by doing the whole bloom themselves. It's an architectural blastov.”
Calling the following year, Life Magazine declared Mr. Seller “Way Out Orpheus” and his first home, a dizzy multi-level ski chalet, “happening.”
Despite the publicity, the seller was a wealthy man who wanted it to never happen. But others did. The idealistic young architects from around the country made a pilgrimage to join the crew of his work. Disillusioned with Princeton's Graduate School of Architecture, Steve Badanes was one of them.
“I saw these people as a way to live a good life using architecture,” Badanes said. He spoke to architecture critic Curry Jacobs in 2006. “I said, 'This is good. I could do this.' That vision motivated me to stick there and graduate from school. (Badanes found his own design and build company, Jersey Devil.)
Many people were attracted to the thorny mountains and bought lots. The seller sold it for $4,000. He had secured 75 acres as a communal land, so he encouraged the homestavers he participated in to innovate. One of the most curious and ambitious projects designed and built by Jim Sanford, Bill McCrae and Dick Travers was a multi-family structure called the Dimetrodon, named after a mammal-like reptile that lived nearly 300 million years ago and regulated its temperature with giant fins. The building's design is so singular that it is contrary to description.
Over the decades, around 20 homes were built on spiny mountains, with many of the original homestavers, including Sanford, remaining in the area. Reineke left early.
“There will be more architects per person in Mud River Valley than in Manhattan,” said architect and urbanist John Connell, founder of the influential Yesterdayrorrow Design/Build School in nearby Waitsfield. Like Prickly Mountain, its focus lies on traditional building techniques, sustainable practices and alternative energy technologies.
“There's no thornless Yesterdayrrow,” Connell added.
Sellers “was Zolba for many of us,” said Louis McCal, a Yale alumnus who bought lots of houses, even the door latch, and built them. “His attitude was, 'I just did it. I can build anything.'' He enjoyed the challenge of stacking plywood. ”
Sellers' designs – Among them, within the tackhouse, named after the horse barn where he lived with his young family, was a bold, eccentric structure, with odd angles, spiral staircases and foam-shaped plexiglass windows on the rising ceiling. At Tuckhouse, the kitchen sink was a roasting pot, and the fridge was cantilevered through the outer opening, turning it off in the winter, saving energy. He also made an inflatable shower that suits 10 people.
“He's raised two fours and 16 penny nails to something amazingly beautiful,” Sanford said.
For Patch Adams, a doctor activist who wanted to build a free hospital in West Virginia, Sellers designed and built four whimsical structures, including something similar to the collection of shingles minarets. Dr. Adams arrives at a thorny mountain wearing clown gear. He had heard that Mr. Seller was of the same family spirit.
“Hippy Gothic” is the way architectural critic Jacobs explained Sellers' aesthetics in an interview.
“If Dave Sellers moved to New York City after a thorny mountain, he could probably sell what he did there,” she added. “If he had that ambition and that ego, he might have done what Frank Gehry did. It's about selling his eccentricity as a key architectural movement.”
But he wasn't without ambition. Sellers created master plans for cities such as Burlington and frequently consulted for Mayor Bernie Sanders. Many of his inventions included his own version of the wood stove and electric cars, a molded plastic sled called the Mud River Rocket. He started a company selling wind generators. The other was exploring hydroelectric power generation. For a while he was interested in aquaculture.
In 1980 he won the race to work at St. John's sacred cathedral in New York City, beating prominent things like Buckminsterfuller. His design, which includes glass and delicate cast iron column shells, was never realized because the funds he wanted were not received.
Even the spiny mountains never had a wealth of money. Connell, who worked early for Mr. Seller, recalled that he was paid primarily in lobster and apple pie for a house built for a jewellery designer in Maine.
Applicants for the seller's architectural practices had to take a rigorous examination to ensure they were appropriate. Among the questions they had to answer were, “Who invented the glass door?” and “What would you serve for midsummer dinner for 16 guests in a formal garden setting?”
David Edward Sellers was born in Chicago on September 7, 1938. Chicago is Frederick Sellers' three sons, executives at commercial printing company RR Donnelly and a Georgiana (Köhler) seller. Growing up in Wilmette, Illinois, he was an Eagle Scout and Mathematics whisk, studying mathematics and chemistry at Yale and graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor of Science in Industrial Management. That fall, he enrolled in the university's architecture school.
In addition to his daughter and son, Mr. Sellers was survived by his brother Ed. Three grandchildren. and his longtime partner, Lucy O'Brien. Her marriage to artist Candy Barr ended with a divorce in 1986.
The spiny mountains may not have begun a revolution, but the spirit endured. In recent years, the seller has been investigating concrete as a building material for “homes of the future.” He built a prototype, a Madonian home, a fantastical brutal style net zero, and a showplace for fireplaces.
“He didn't do things along the way, and he didn't do anything that wasn't interesting,” said investment banker and Mountaineer Jack Wadsworth.
“What always came out was his pure genius and talent,” added Wadsworth. “And his ability to make anything.”
