David Sellers, another one of my heros

Community, Design 5

David Sellers, another one of my heros

by Moneca Kaiser, June, 06 2011

In keeping with my theme of teaching from last week, this weeks story is all about one of my hero’s and mentors, David Sellers. I met David when I went to Yestermorrow to take a home design course and the whole time I was creating what I humbly call, “the beautiful house,” and will share with you in another post someday, everyone kept saying, “wow wait till Sellers sees this, he’s gonna love it!” and sure enough when he juried my work… he did! and we became friends since. He said, “Moneca, with this kind of vision people will jump on board, you have to go for it!” and gave me the courage and inspiration to keep climbing the mountain.

A few years later I was back to Yestermorrow to participate in a Sustainable Communities of the Future class created by David and this blog is a direct off shoot of the mission he sent us back home with, to bring home and share what we discovered with our communities and create a better world. I also got started on a little book or something born of that class and will share that too on a future post someday, it was so much fun to spend a week with like minded people envisioning utopia and actually designing it, mapping it and even modeling it in clay. I highly recommend it if you want a week to dream in a beautiful place with a visionary educator.

I’ve taken my favorite parts from this great article in the Burlington Free Press written by Sally Pollak, and have shared excerpts of it word for word except for my comments which are in italics

Architecture 101: No permits, no parents, no clients, plenty of plywood for architect Sellers and friends (I WISH, can hardly imagine in this city where everything is in triplicate.)

David Sellers, an architect based in Warren, was an architecture student at Yale with a job on the New Haven construction site. He was hanging around the garage one day, delivering coffee, when the site was buzzing about a big meeting: Rudolph is coming! Rudolph is coming! Sure enough, the architect showed up with his design plans, spread them out on the level under construction, and had a word with the crew. The concrete foreman stood behind Rudolph as he talked to the builders, making funny faces. What’s going on? Sellers wondered. He learned the concrete guy was teasing Rudolph because the architect didn’t know how to build things — he couldn’t actually make stuff, Sellers said. “That’s it,” Sellers decided. “I’m not going to let that happen to me. I don’t ever want to be on a construction site laughed at by the builders.” I knew going into this that I wanted and needed to be a carpenter before taking on the design in any significant way, even if only to say, “yes it can be done” I feel that being a builder, a maker lends itself to an elegance in design, things are never complicated even though they are complex.

“If you only knew how to make something,” Sellers said, “you can make something beautiful.”

The place he constructed with his friends, which they called Prickly Mountain, is a pioneering work in Vermont’s design/build movement. It was the subject of a 2008 retrospective at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum.

“There were no permits and no parents to tell us this is a bad idea,” Sellers said. “My parents didn’t know where I was.” The plywood houses were designed as they were being built, and built as they were being designed. The architects made sketches on two-by-fours. They dreamed up the “wild beam theory,” whereby a beam is longer than the span it fills — with the overhang left in place for possible later use, and for looks. “We developed a sense of aesthetics that comes out of the materials, and how you put the materials together,” Sellers said. “It comes out of plywood.”

Sellers became convinced that understanding materials is the cornerstone for developing new and interesting ideas, and building beautiful structures that last.

Ed Owre, a UVM emeritus professor of art, who joined with Sellers and others recalled, “I thought, ‘Why not?'”The design/build is sort of fun, ’cause you never know what’s going to happen.” “Everything we did, we tried to trump it,” Owre said and remembers seeing Sellers make a mistake building a concrete foundation – he used the wrong size stakes, – and continued pouring concrete from his truck. That’s his power, in a way,” Owre said. “To go ahead with it.” and what I love about him, the best things are born of my detours that’s where God whispers when I don’t have potatoes in my ears.

“You have to operate on the frontier of what’s possible,” Sellers said. “To know what’s possible, you have to know where it won’t work. I’m not operating at my full potential, unless there’s a high risk for failure.” such truth for me in this too, It’s always best when it’s terrifying, though David never seems scared, I guess that’s why he is one of my heros.

A few miles from Prickly Mountain, on another Warren hillside, is a concrete house Sellers calls the Archy Bunker. He built the house a few years ago with students at Yestermorrow, a design/build school in Warren. (Sellers teaches at Yestermorrow, and has taught at Yale, MIT and Goddard, where he founded the design/build program.)

If Prickly Mountain was a crash-course in the Joy of Plywood (as Sellers names his courses), Archy’s Bunker is about the Joy of Concrete. This place is delightful!

Sellers and his students nailed together arched plywood forms from his design of the Pitcher Inn in Warren, pieces set to be thrown out, and poured concrete on them. “We made a piece of spatial sculpture, and then we figured out where we wanted to put functional things,” Sellers said. The 1,100-square foot home, with a spring-fed swimming pool on its south side, exhibits various uses, forms and textures of concrete: rounded (and rough-edged) ceilings; cantilevered balconies; a deep square bathtub with a view, and a pre-cast sink.

The house was honored last year by the American Institute of Architects. It was built Prickly Mountain-style: with no client and no formal design. This kind of freedom in architecture is what Sellers prefers, and what interests him. He calls the profession in its standard practice “bankrupt.”

“For people who are creative, well trained, have ideas and are talented, architecture is a huge disappointment,” Seller said. “It’s too restrictive, it’s not inclusive. It’s passive design: when the architect doesn’t have a role in the idea.”

Sellers, 70, has worked in “green” design for decades, from wind power to anti-sprawl planning, back when green was only a color. He says land, in finite supply, should not be sold for profit. “Land is not like pencils,” Sellers said. “You can’t make more and more of it.” His work includes designs for the Gesundheit Institute, the big-laughs, no-cost medical model of Patch Adams (played by Robin Williams in the movie). Sellers recently opened a museum in Waitsfield, the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design.

Moneca Kaiser

0 Comment

Leave a Reply