Dan D'Ambrosio|Burlington Free Press
Show Caption
WARREN - People in glass houses are admonished not to throw stones. How about people in concrete houses?
Well, they can throw whatever they want, because houses built of concrete are virtually indestructible, according to a groundbreaking architect who has spent the past 56 years following his muse in the Mad River Valley.
David Sellers, 83, is obsessed with concrete houses. Done right, Sellers said, concrete can be used to build a house that is beautiful, cheap and will last for 500 years.
An ancient material invented by the Romans, concrete was used to build the Pantheon, before the material fell into obscurity for a millennium or two, according to Devin Colman, Vermont's State Architectural Historian. Concrete has just four main elements: cement, sand, gravel and water. Cement is a combination of clay and limestone.
"Depending on what kind of sand and gravel you use you can get exposed aggregate," Colman said. "You can use a warm, reddish colored sand to get a warm feeling, so it's not all just grey monolith."
The Pantheon, built in Rome in the 2nd century AD, is "one of the landmarks of civilization," Colman said.
"Then, for whatever reason, the knowledge (of concrete) just kind of disappeared," he said. "In the mid-19th century people started experimenting again. They started rediscovering the material and putting it to use for factories, bridges, more utilitarian purposes. Then gradually it moved into housing and churches."
The wonders of the Pantheon: Incredible ancient Roman engineering, still standing for nearly 2,000 years
Sellers has built three concrete houses in the Mad River Valley, the most recent being an 800-square-foot affordable home he sold to a young family for $200,000, along with three acres of land. The "tilt-up" house, as it is known, is an unfinished shell, but Sellers believes it can be finished for about $75,000.
Sellers said he made $20,000 on the tilt-up house because it was so cheap to build. The tilt-up name comes from the technique he employed to build the house. Instead of making complex forms to pour the concrete into, which is expensive and wasteful, Sellers and his crew poured the concrete flat on the ground on two inches of foam insulation, using a sheet of polyethylene and a simple 2X6 wooden frame.
Sellers also incorporated windowand door framesinto the wall when it was poured. The walls are three and half inches thick, combined with two inches of insulation for a total width of five and half inches.The walls were tilted up using a backhoe and bolted into place. Quick, easy and cheap.
You can draw, but can you build?
Sellers graduated from the Yale School of Architecture in 1965, and immediately set about correcting what he believed was a shortcoming of his education at one of the finest architecture schools in America.
"I realized my education was incomplete," Sellers said. "They didn't show you how to make a building. They showed you how to draw a picture of a building."
Sellers still looks the part of a rebel.He wears a dark wool Himalayan hat with ear flaps that he never takes off. His face is weatheredand ruddy, deeply creased and toppedwith bushy gray eyebrows. He has clear blue eyes.
In 1965, Sellers gathered together a crew of four fellow Yale architecture graduates who felt the same way he did. Each of them contributed $2,000 to a kitty of $10,000. The idea was to buyland and start building. Sellers had picked up building skills working summer jobs while he was at Yale.
"I said we got to find some land somewhere to do something," Sellers remembered. "OK, nobody in their right mind would hire a bunch of kids out of school, so it's got to be a vacation house. Let's get some property on Fire Island, somewhere near New York City."
After being laughed off Fire Island by real estate agents who told them they were 75 years too late, Sellers and his crew turned their attention northward. Maybe those same clients in Manhattan would be up for a country home in Vermont or Maine.
Sellers identified two possibilities. Vermont'sMad River Valley, which happened to be the same size in land mass as Manhattan, and a valley in Maine owned by a paper company not interested in selling. Mad River Valley it was. Sellers and his partners bought 425 acres for $75,000 near Warren. They put $1,000 down and paid $1,000 a year for 10 years before finishing off with a balloon payment. The land included Prickly Mountain, which became the namesake of their endeavors.
Colman sees the Prickly Mountain collaboration as one of Sellers' most important contributions to architecture.He credits Sellers with playing an important role as one of the early founders of the design/build movement, in which the architect is also the builder.
"He was willing to reject that formal training (at Yale) and say, 'I'm going to do it this way, I don't care what anyone else thinks,'" Colman said. "It was a big leap, a risk. He's continued that in his career, staying rooted in Vermont. As he gained success and bigger commissionshe didn't pick up and move to New York or Los Angeles."
'Who wants to come to Vermont?'
After their down payment on Prickly Mountain, Sellers and his crew realized they didn't have enough money left to build anything.
"I had a really great idea," Sellers said. "I went back to classmates and said, 'Who wants to come to Vermont for $500 pay at the end of the summer, room and board and we'll build stuff?' So I got about 10 students to agree to that."
Sellers lined up credit for building materials and food at local businesses.
"We had land, we had materials, we had food and labor and we just started building stuff. No clients," Sellers said. "We built houses. That's what we thought would sell."
The Yale architecture students building houses in the Mad River Valley for no one in particular began to get a lot of attention, including from Life magazine, the New York Times and House Beautiful.
"People started asking us to do stuff because we got a lot of publicity," Sellers said. "Everybody wanted to publish our stuff."
Sellers figured he would spend about a year building houses at Prickly Mountain before moving on.
"The year's not up yet," he said. "I personally built I think five houses up there."
Sellers went on to have a significant career as an architect, working all over the country. He built wine cellars for large vineyards in California. He built the greenhouse for The Daily Planet restaurant in Burlington. He worked with Dr. Patch Adams— played by Robin Williams in a 1998 movie— at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia for 18 years, where he master-planned the campus, and built three buildings.
Sellers also built medical clinics in El Salvador and Honduras with Adams, and designed a hospital the Gesundheit Institute is fundraising to build.
"Patch Adams said, 'Good health is a laughing matter, the hospital should be funny,'" Sellers remembered. "If this isn't the silliest thing you've ever done in your life, start over."
Now, in the twilight of his career, and his life, Sellers has turned his attention to concrete.
It's called the Archie Bunker House
The Archie Bunker House was Sellers' first concrete house, built to prove to himself he could do it. Entering the house, there's a small kitchen to your right and stairs down to a large living area, with bedrooms up another set of stairs. The concrete feels strangely warm and welcoming despite its mass, like hand-hewn wooden beams.
The name of the house comes from its bunker-like durability and its many arches, morphed into the name of the popular television character from the 1970s.
Sellers recalls an incident that hammered home the invincibility of concrete construction. He said it happened about seven years ago, when a woman and her children came up from Connecticut to rent the house. It was 20 below.
"You know what Vermonters call flatlanders, they don't know how to light a fire in the fireplace," Sellers said. "They thought the most important thing to do was to make the fire as big as possible. So they got the thing just roaring, really roaring. Then they went out to dinner."
First the rug caught on fire. Then the bookcase. Then the furniture, and then anything else flammable.
"The fire roared through the entire house," Sellers said. "Everything flammable burned. I was at the movies. I got a call saying, 'Hey your house is on fire.'"
Hold the bulldozers
After putting the fire out, the fire chief wanted to do what he usually did with houses totaled by fire. Bulldoze the remaining structure into the cellar hole and finish burning it.
"I had to convince the fire marshal we could rebuild with the shell," Sellers said. "The idea of a fireproof house would never have occurred to us when we built it. People accuse me of setting the fire myself as a marketing scam."
Sellers had brought in his structural engineer to examine the house.
"Because it's concrete the engineer impact-tested it," Sellers said. "He came back and said, 'You won't believe it.This is 99% perfect."
The only sign of the fire today is some minor surface damage where the 40-degree water from the fire trucks hit the 500-degree surface of the concrete, causing some flaking. Sellers said he's working on building plans for a woman from Paradise, California, who contacted him after hearing how the Archie Bunker House had held up to fire.
This one is a home run
After the Archie Bunker House, Sellers built the 1,800-square-foot Home Run House—a dream home, the ultimate expression of what can be done. It cost about $1 million to build, underwritten by two wealthy retired bankers that Sellers has known for years. The house rents for $534 a night. It is owned by the Madsonian Museum of Industrial Design in Waitsfield— another Sellers creation— and helps pay the museum's expenses.
When Sellers gave a recent tour, Jack and Karolyne Petruzelli from Rochester, New York, were staying for the weekend.
"What I thought was, 'For once the pictures did something justice,'" Karolyne Petruzelli said. "(Jack)hadn't even gone upstairs yet when he said, 'This was a great pick.'"
Despite its relatively modest size, the Home Run House oozes grandeur, with its massive concrete walls and expansive interior, sprinkled with plants and exotic trees.
"We wanted to have it so in the winter it would be like being in the jungle," Sellers said. "Winters are dark and cold in Vermont. You come in and there are plants all over the place. We have a banana tree in the other room."
Sellers executed every innovative idea he could think of in the Home Run House. Like the Archie Bunker House, an entire living room wall rolls out of the way, by hand,to bring the outdoors inside. Here, Sellers took the idea even further, putting another mobile wall in the upstairs bedroom, where the bed can then be rolled onto an outside deck, among the trees and stars.
The electrical and plumbing infrastructure is easily accessible through floor panels, making the Home Run House adaptable into other forms, including a three-family house, each with separate facilities, or a homeless shelter for up to 50 people.
"All the partitions you see here are removable in two or three hours," Sellers said. "You can change the entire interior really easily. We thought the house should be expandable internally for different uses."
Sellers reasoned that if the Home Run House could last 500 years, conditions could be dramatically different in five centuries, so it made sense to make the house adaptable to other uses.
Unusual tilted house: Vermont home intrigues everybody and creates bidding war among buyers
In an upstairs bathroom, the elemental attraction of concrete is on full display in a deep soaking tub that looks like it was plucked from an ancient Roman villa.
The fascinating details of the house kept the Petruzellis constantly guessing. Now that they had the architect on hand, they had lots of questions. For example, what were those indentations in the kitchen ceiling? What purpose did they serve?
Turned out it was an ice cube tray pressed into the wet concrete during construction. The tray made ice cubes in the form of arrows, so Sellers and his crew aligned the arrows to the four directions, north, south, east and west. The directions aren't marked, but renters often figure out the puzzle for themselves.
If the Home Run House is the zenith of Sellers' concrete artistry, the Tilt-Up House is the future. It is, after all, the only concrete house most Vermonters would be able to afford.
"I'm ready to do the next one," Sellers said. "The critical stuff I needed to prove is done."
Contact Dan D’Ambrosio at 660-1841 or ddambrosio@freepressmedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @DanDambrosioVT.This coverage is only possible with support from our readers.
