"Somewhere between back to the land and back to the future": the architects who built a mini-topia in Vermont
The Dimetrodon (from Docomomo)
Great story (tipped off to us by the brilliant urbanist Adam Greenfield, below):
Here’s the piece he cites from the Daily Beast. Our interest here in AG is in how land can be a platform for experiment in physical and social design - we’ll take what the elites get up to, and see if it can be scaled and disseminated as a method/practice/facility for all.
All of these late sixties/early seventies projects took place in and around an area called Prickly Mountain, near Warren, in the US state of Vermont - a colony of hippie architects wanting the freedom to build according to countercultural values. They called themselves the Design/Build movement (see the documentary trailer at the end of this post, this blog from Docomomo, and this book).
Probably the best example of the “eco-modern cycles” Greenfield talks about is the Dimetrodon:
From COLLECTIVE QUARTERLY
As Solar House History reports:
The Dimetrodon was built in Vermont, by Bill Maclay, Jim Sanford, and Dick Travers in 1971. It was a multi-family community using solar, wind and wood energy systems. Maclay, still practicing today, says it was “a more environmentally sound pattern for growth” than the dominant pattern based on “suburban sprawl, strip development and the advent of the automobile.”
It was an ad-hoc design, which evolved during construction with the participation of other residents. Sanford, also still practicing as of 2015, told Seth Putnam: “There was no forethought whatsoever. The people who lived there had to subscribe to a common idea, or it wouldn’t have worked.”
The Tack House
The Tack House - available for rent on Airbnb - also provides an organic, evolving experience as a resident. From The Daily Beast:
The Tack House was begun in 1965 and worked on over decades… The house is both rough-hewn and science fictional. The steampunk feeling is no surprise; it was never planned in its entirety but rather a gradual accretion, the product of a series of ad hoc design decisions and never any single moment.
It’s a surreal experience. A friend and I were summoned in by the owner, Candy Barr, up a ladder, which is probably not the way you’ve entered most homes. Typical conceptions of space are out the window here; you’d be hard-pressed to describe where many rooms end and others begin. There’s a bunk bed directly over a shower overlooking a kitchen. Ladders and winding stairways twist through amorphous spaces; roof windows slant or bulge out. Windows and gaps are incised throughout.
Bundy Modern - one of Prickly Mountain’s finest constructions
Enjoy also this very groovy Life magazine feature on a Skihouse in Prickly Mountain. The trailer for the documentary is below. David Sellars, the Design/Build movement’s guru, concludes this:
The people who did that all had something in common. They were all trying to make something. That common attitude created a common neighborhood culture. It’s not a commune, it wasn’t a radical dropout thing either. The addiction was the opportunity to make something.
Let’s get back to that addiction, for an age of planetary boundaries and computation!