The Legacy of Prickly Mountain

Built as an antiestablishment utopia in the mid 1960s, Vermont enclave Prickly Mountain has had a profound influence on contemporary architecture

by Karrie Jacobs

I’ve always loved the kind of novels that offer an alternative view of the present, where the plot is predicated on one key event in history playing out differently. For instance, there’s Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration, set in England nearly five centuries after the Protestant Reformation didn’t take place. The Catholic Church is unchallenged in its authority, and castrati still sing in the choir. Similarly when Czech Cubism, the surreal cousin to Modernism, emerged after the disintegration of the Iron Curtain, I tried to imagine what the world would be like today if, instead of the rectilinear approach associated with the Bauhaus, an architecture based on triangles and crystalline forms became the norm. Imagine Park Avenue lined with buildings that look like…well, like Norman Foster’s new Hearst headquarters.

This is the appeal of Prickly Mountain. A 425-acre enclave not far from the Sugarbush ski resort, it’s a repository of an architectural revolution that never quite took off, a storybook version of the world as it might have been. Or as Progressive Architecture put it in May 1966: “Are you ready? 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.”

David Sellers, one of the two mountaineers (the other was his classmate Bill Rienecke), had finished his Yale thesis project early and came to Vermont looking to buy land. “And we just never left,” he says. Sellers, now 68, is driving me along the dirt roads of the community he began building 40 years ago. White-haired and a little soft around the middle, he’s still infinitely energetic and, as one reporter said long ago, “comes on with words like a Mack Truck.” His stories, like his architecture, never travel directly from point A to point B. His history of Prickly Mountain begins with a short detour in which he investigated “using ice structures as molds for concrete.”

Eventually Sellers and Rienecke bought some land. They each made a $1,000 down payment on a property that they assumed would attract well-heeled skiers. Then they got some friends together and—tossing aside all they’d learned at the feet of Yale professors such as Paul Rudolph about the dignity of the profession—began building structures as the land, materials, and mood dictated. What emerged were new forms: wedges sticking this way and that, cantilevered bridges to nowhere that took maximum advantage of spectacular views, and oddly positioned windows, skylights, and decks. There was even a free-form apartment complex named Dimetrodon, after the ridge-backed dinosaur that inspired the shape of the underlying space frame. It all would have been another isolated example of hippie eccentricity except Life magazine arrived and gave Prickly Mountain a spread in its March 24, 1967, issue: “From the midst of snow-steeped spruces on the mountainside, a new shape jumps—that’s just the word—against a Vermont sky,” the text trumpeted. “The varicolored wood-and-glass construction is a weekend ski house built by a way-out Orpheus.”