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New York Times
27-03-2025
- General
- New York Times
Pilar Viladas Dies at 70; Journalist Chronicled Trends in Design
Pilar Viladas, a veteran writer and editor whose human touch and encyclopedic knowledge of architecture, design and art history gave her work a quiet authority, died on March 15 at a hospital near her home in Southbury, Conn. She was 70. The cause was amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, her sister Luisa Viladas said. Starting at Interiors magazine, a trade publication, in 1979, Ms. Viladas's decades-long career traced the whipsaw design trends of the past half-century, including the arch whimsy of the Memphis movement in early 1980s Italy, the gilded excesses of late-1980s interiors, the minimalism of the '90s and the swaggering era of star architects at the turn of the last millennium. Ms. Viladas was an editor at Progressive Architecture, HG and The New York Times Magazine, and a contributor to Town & Country and Architectural Digest, among many other magazines that documented, with anthropological zest, the totems of privilege and lives well lived. But Ms. Viladas wasn't interested in fads or fetishes, although she noted them with amusement. Her taste was for enduring expressions of good design. Holly Brubach, a former style director of The Times Magazine, hired her in 1997, after Ms. Viladas had completed a Loeb Fellowship in advanced environmental studies at Harvard. 'It was the era of the starchitect, and all those sleek, slick, glitzy buildings,' Ms. Brubach said in an interview. But Ms. Viladas, she said, 'was more interested in the way people lived and the role design played in their lives — and I don't mean the aerodynamic shape of a chair.' 'It was how people arranged their homes and made a place for the things they loved,' Ms. Brubach added. 'She brought a human perspective to it that I really admired.' At The Times Magazine, Ms. Viladas covered a who's who of design stars. She wrote about the modernist architect Deborah Berke and the eclectic domestic interiors of Calvin Tsao and Zack McKown. She visited the apartment, at the San Remo, on Central Park West, of the fashion designer Donna Karan and her husband, the sculptor Stephen Weiss. And she chronicled the work of the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando for fashion designers like Karl Lagerfeld and Giorgio Armani. Her favorite house, Ms. Viladas often said, was the Houston showplace of John and Dominique de Menil, the Schlumberger oil family scions and art collectors — a low-slung glass and brick house designed by Philip Johnson, with interiors by the fashion designer Charles James. When she visited in 1999, a few years after Ms. de Menil's death, she marveled at the home's 'material splendor — suave modern architecture, jaw-dropping art and serious furniture — and its casual down-to-earth aura.' Ms. Viladas also wrote about her favorite apartment: 'the impossibly chic London flat' belonging to Ingrid Bergman's character in 'Indiscreet,' the 1958 romantic comedy that co-starred Cary Grant as a man pretending to be married to escape commitment. Ms. Viladas loved the riot of color and texture in the apartment's elegantly proportioned living room (not to mention the film's tart dialogue). 'Because she was so educated, she could recognize intention in design and, for her, that was always good,' said the writer William Norwich, a former colleague at The Times Magazine. 'She was a discerner, and she was a gatekeeper, but she was not a snob.' The photographer William Abranowicz, who shot the de Menil house for Ms. Viladas's 1999 piece (and for many more of her articles) said of her: 'She trusted you to walk into a space, to feel what she could articulate and to make an image. The other thing I loved about Pilar was sometimes when you did a story with a designer, they would try and steer the story. That's when her teeth came out — and she had some good teeth.' Maria Pilar Viladas was born on May 6, 1954, in Greenwich, Conn., the eldest of four children of Angeline (Schimizzi) Viladas and Joseph M. Viladas, a marketing research consultant. She attended Greenwich High School and studied art history at Harvard University, graduating in 1977. In addition to her sister Luisa, Ms. Viladas is survived by another sister, Mina Viladas. Their brother, Jordi, died in 2022. Ms. Viladas was the author of and a contributor to many design and architecture books, including 'Los Angeles: A Certain Style' (1995) and 'Domesticities: At Home with The New York Times Magazine' (2005). 'I have an idealistic view of design,' she told Whisper Editions, the former art and design auction site, where she was a consultant, in 2014. 'Design is a much bigger idea than how a lamp works. It's a way of looking at the world.'
Boston Globe
16-03-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
David Sellers, iconoclastic father of the design-build movement, dies at 86
Advertisement 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. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement '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. Advertisement 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.' This article originally appeared in
