The Legacy of Prickly Mountain

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Between the initial migration to Prickly Mountain in the 1960s and those attracted later by Yester-morrow, Sellers claims, “there are more architects per capita in Warren Village than anyplace in America.” He counts off ten firms and estimates that each employs five additional architects. (With a 2000 census population of 1,681, that would be one architect for every 28 residents.) Indeed what sets Prickly Mountain apart from other pockets of hippie-era homes is that it represents an act of rebellion by a cadre of well-trained young architects. It’s as if the blob wizards who emerged from their computers at Columbia in the late 1990s had run off together and built a town.

Now, 40 years later, it may finally be time to figure out what Prickly Mountain means. Vermont architectural designer Danny Sagan received a Graham Foundation grant for “An Oral History of the Design-Build Movement in Vermont and New England from 1960 to the Present.” He’s been interviewing everyone who ever had anything to do with Prickly Mountain in preparation for an exhibition that is tentatively scheduled for fall 2008. “The idea of the show is to start paying attention to what’s called the counterculture and how it has influenced our life in Vermont.”

I think the influence of Prickly Mountain actually goes beyond Vermont. It has a place in the continuum of architectural history somewhere be-tween Andrew Geller’s quirky geometric 1950s beach houses and the early works for which Frank Gehry earned his reputation. And it still has an influence today: the design-build movement has been enjoying a renaissance in part because pioneers like Badanes continue to teach. But to me the true appeal of this outpost of “architecture as a way to have a good life” is that it tells a story as inventive as any work of fiction of an ­alternative—and perhaps more benign—version of the present.

Provided by Metropolis Magazine—The Magazine of Architecture, Culture, and Design