David Sellers, iconoclastic father of the design-build movement, dies at 86

Boston Globe

16-03-2025

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Surmising that no one would bankroll a couple of untried architecture students, they looked for cheap land where they could build vacation homes on speculation.
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After being laughed out of New York's Fire Island, where they were told they were 75 years too late for such an endeavor, they headed to Vermont. There, a farmer sold them 425 acres in the Mad River Valley, near the Sugarbush and Mad River Glen ski resorts, for a sum now lost in the mists of time; they each made a down payment of $1,000. Naming the place Prickly Mountain, in honor of the wounds a friend had suffered after sitting on a raspberry bush, they began to build.
After making the down payment, they were nearly broke, but local businesses let them buy materials and food on credit. They economized on labor. Mr. Sellers enticed Yale students to spend their summers working on Prickly Mountain in exchange for food, lodging, and $500.
Vermont was a welcome spot for those in search of utopia. Back-to-the-landers were building communes and setting up food co-ops. There were no building codes or inspectors, and the houses that began to spring up on Prickly Mountain were unicorns: entrancing assemblages of new forms and ideas, incorporating green energy technologies such as passive solar design and wind.
'Are you ready?' the magazine Progressive Architecture wrote in 1966. 'Two lumbering mountaineers just out of Yale Architecture have a project going called Prickly Mountain … and they're putting down the Establishment by acting as entrepreneur, land speculator, and contractor and craftsman as well as architects, and doing the whole blooming thing themselves. It's architectural blastoff.'
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Life magazine, which came calling the next year, declared Mr. Sellers 'a way-out Orpheus' and his first house — a dizzying, multilevel ski chalet — 'a Happening.'
Despite the publicity, the rich weekenders Mr. Sellers had hoped for never materialized. But others did. Idealistic young architects from all over the country made pilgrimages to join his work crews. Steve Badanes, disenchanted with Princeton University's graduate school of architecture, was one of them.
'I saw these guys basically using architecture as a way to have a good life,' Badanes told architecture critic Karrie Jacobs in 2006. 'I said, 'This is good. I could do this.' That vision gave me the willingness to hang in there and finish school.' (Badanes went on to found his own design-build firm, Jersey Devil.)
Many who were drawn to Prickly Mountain bought lots, which Mr. Sellers sold for $4,000, often with a 'pay when you can' proviso. He had set aside 75 acres as communal land, and he encouraged the homesteaders who joined him to innovate as he did. One of the most curious and ambitious projects, designed and built by Jim Sanford, Bill Maclay, and Dick Travers, was a multifamily structure called the Dimetrodon, named for a mammallike reptile that lived nearly 300 million years ago and regulated its temperature with a giant fin. The building's design is so idiosyncratic that it defies description.
Over the decades, about 20 houses were built on Prickly Mountain, and many of the original homesteaders, including Sanford, remained in the area. Reineke left early on.
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'There's probably more architects per capita in the Mad River Valley than in Manhattan,' said John Connell, an architect and urbanist who was a founder of the influential Yestermorrow Design/Build School in nearby Waitsfield. Its focus, like Prickly Mountain's, is on traditional building techniques, sustainable practices, and alternative energy technologies.
'There would be no Yestermorrow without Prickly,' Connell added.
Mr. Sellers 'was Zorba to many of us,' said Louis Mackall, a Yale graduate who bought a lot and built a house, constructing everything himself, down to the latches on the doors. 'His attitude was 'Just do it. You can build anything.' He enjoyed the challenge of a stack of plywood.'
Mr. Sellers' designs — among them the Tack House, named for the horse barn it replaced, where he lived with his young family — were bold, eccentric structures, with bubble-shaped plexiglass windows set at odd angles, spiral staircases, and soaring ceilings. At the Tack House, the kitchen sink was a roasting pan, and the refrigerator cantilevered through an opening to the outside so it could be turned off in the winter, saving energy. He also built an inflatable shower that fit 10 people.
'He elevated the two-by-four and the 16-penny nail into things of great beauty,' Sanford said.
For Patch Adams, a doctor-activist-clown who hoped to build a free hospital in West Virginia, Mr. Sellers designed and built four whimsical structures, including one that resembled a collection of shingled minarets. Adams arrived at Prickly Mountain dressed in his clown gear; he had heard that Mr. Sellers was a kindred spirit.
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'Hippie Gothic' is how Jacobs described Mr. Sellers' aesthetic in an interview.
A whimsical structure resembling a collection of shingled minarets was designed and built by Mr. Sellers for Patch Adams, the doctor-activist-clown.
JOEL STERNFELD/NYT
'If Dave Sellers had moved to New York City after Prickly Mountain, he probably could have sold what he'd done there,' she said. 'If he had that ambition and that ego, he could have done what Frank Gehry did, which is to sell his eccentricities as an important architectural movement.'
But he was not without ambition. M. Sellers created master plans for cities such as Burlington, Vt., consulting often for its mayor, Bernie Sanders. His many inventions included his own versions of a wood stove and an electric car, as well as a molded plastic sled called the Mad River Rocket. He started a company to sell wind generators, and another to explore hydropower. For a time, he was interested in aquaculture.
A molded plastic sled designed by Mr. Sellers was called the Mad River Rocket.
VIA TRILLIUM ROSE/NYT
In 1980, he won a competition to work on the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City, beating out notables such as Buckminster Fuller. His design, which involved a carapace of glass and delicate cast-iron columns, was never realized because the funding didn't come through.
Money was never in abundance on Prickly Mountain, either. Connell, who early on worked for Mr. Sellers, recalled being paid mostly in lobsters and apple pies for a house built for a jewelry designer in Maine.
Would-be applicants to Mr. Sellers' architecture practice had to undergo a rigorous exam to make sure they were the right fit. Among the questions they had to answer: 'Who invented the glass door?' and 'What would you serve for dinner midsummer for 16 guests in a formal garden setting?'
David Edward Sellers was born Sept. 7, 1938, in Chicago, one of three sons of Frederick Sellers, an executive at the commercial printing company R.R. Donnelly, and Georgiana (Koehler) Sellers. Growing up in Wilmette, Ill., he was an Eagle Scout and a math whiz, and he went on to study mathematics and chemistry at Yale, where he graduated in 1960 with a bachelor of science degree in industrial administration. That fall, he entered the university's school of architecture.
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In addition to his daughter and his son, Mr. Sellers leaves a brother, Ed; three grandchildren; and his longtime partner, Lucy O'Brien. His marriage to Candy Barr, an artist, ended in divorce in 1986.
Prickly Mountain might not have started a revolution, but its ethos endured. In recent years, Mr. Sellers had been investigating concrete as a building material for the 'house of the future.' He built a prototype, the Madsonian House, a fanciful Brutalist-style, net-zero, fireproof showplace named for the museum he created to house his collection of vintage toys and other design artifacts.
'He didn't do things halfway, and he didn't do things that weren't interesting,' said Jack Wadsworth, an investment banker and Prickly Mountain veteran who spent many summers working on Mr. Sellers' crews, chipped in when Mr. Sellers had an idea to build affordable housing, and helped fund the Madsonian house.
'What always came through was his sheer genius and talent,' Wadsworth added. 'And his ability to make just about anything.'
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