DAVID SELLERS
would deal with that later because it’s not that big of a deal. Eventually, we sliced “the thing” in pieces. Imagine twenty to thirty people carrying giant curved pieces of foam down the hill. Then we forgot to number them! LK: Oh, no! DS: We should have numbered which piece was which. Now they are down the hill; huge amounts of curved sides of foam, each bigger than this room, all stacked up by my friends who volunteered to help me. And so I said, “OK, this is simple. We should put these things back together again.” But imagine each piece, at the size of a Volkswagen, with a curve on it. There was no strategic logic; I was hoping that this piece probably goes next to that piece and so forth. It took me a week to put “the thing” together again. Then I numbered everything with little sticks. Finally, I had this back together again.
DS: They never sent me any comments. I did prove, however, that you can make use of the molds for pouring concrete with $3,000 bucks and many volunteers. That was the cost for the foam. But still, once you add it all up it is about $8,000-9,000 in creating a final shell. I figure that if people could do these things in the backwoods of Vermont, they would populate the land with funny-looking shaped shelters. LK: Among the trees? DS: Yes, but thinking it over, you have to really try hard to make it look beautiful. LK: But you said before, it looked cool. DS: I thought it was beautiful, but could have no sense of control. It was very unpredictable. It is hard to make something beautiful, when you are standing on top of it and predict that it is going to look like something special.
LK: I think now I understand the “disaster aspect” of snow molding. DS: These were all good lessons though, of which I am really proud. The whole experience was really good. At the end, I put a sky hole on the south side to heat the whole thing. I put in three reinforcement rods in the foam, got a spray gun and sprayed it with concrete, like in a thin shell. It was actually a shelter, smaller than I original planned because I threw some pieces away. The size though did not really matter; it was no longer a proof of the concept. It honestly looked really cool. A friend of mine moved in. LK: You said before, that concrete is like jell-o and that it takes the shape of the container? DS: Yes, this was a happy ending to the experiment with “the thing.” Concrete gave an end to the experiment and I thanked the National Endowment for it. LK: Were they pleased?
Eco Redux
Snow molding photo from Seller’s personal archives
LK: Did you ever climb down, back up and say, “OK, I need to do something here and then climb all the way back up and get your saw out to fix it”? DS: Every morning I came down and looked at it. From a distance it looked good, but when I got closer, it was not so good. It kind of looked like a grid castle which was quite interesting, so I still think the concept was nevertheless valuable, but I had to cover it up with concrete. Then I came up
MATERIALS OFF THE CATALOG + DESIGN REMEDIES FOR A DYING PLANET
AN ARCHIVAL & DESIGN RESOURCE FOR ECOLOGICAL MATERIAL EXPERIMENTS BY LYDIA KALLIPOLITI