Fifty years ago this year, a small gang of freshly minted architecture graduates decided to do something radical, something they'd been told they'd never actually do for themselves in the course of their careers: build a house with their own hands.
It was the beginning of a modest revolution in the way that architecture and construction can coexist, and the launch of David Sellers's dizzying adventure of a career. From his base of operations in Vermont's bucolic Mad River Valley, he's designed everything from sleds to electric trains to towns, all following no other guide than his own curiosity and sense of play. At 76, he's just as talkative and energetic as he must have been in 1967, when Life magazine photographed him climbing the living-room wall in his experimental ski lodge and labeled him a "way-out Orpheus."