David Sellers, Father of the Design-Build Movement, Dies at 86

David Sellers, a maverick architect who helped start the design-build movement, creating a community of like-minded innovators near the tiny town of Warren, Vt., died on Feb. 9 in Los Angeles. He was 86.

Mr. Sellers was in California visiting his son, Parker Sellers, to work on a house they had designed together and to promote concrete housing in the aftermath of the recent fires. His daughter, Trillium Rose, said he died in a hospital from complications of a heart condition.

In 1965, Mr. Sellers and William Reineke, graduates of the Yale School of Architecture, had the radical idea that structures turned out better if they were built by the architects who had designed them. They felt that improvisation and experimentation, rather than planning in advance with drawings and blueprints, could make architecture more functional and beautiful. 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.

After being laughed out of 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.

The Archie Bunker House was the first concrete house Mr. Sellers built in the Mad River Valley of Vermont.Credit…Michael Heeney

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.