"There is no use trying to make a mollycoddle out of a mill man." Charles Roebling, third son of John A. Roebling, In the rolling hills of Hopewell Township, enormous houses are sprouting up, some with as many as four-car garages.

Although designed in classical architectural styles, these houses look as if they have just landed. They haven't yet acquired the patina of the more settled-in farmhouses. On the other hand, the home of Morris Docktor and his wife, Lynn, fits right in literally.

That's because it was built underground. The earth-bermed geo-thermal house is constructed into a south-facing hill and utilizes the sun's energy. Unlike earth-bermed houses of the 1970s, featured in the likes of The Whole Earth Catalog and Mother Earth News, this house was crafted with beauty and aesthetics in mind.

Serving as architect/builder, Mr. Docktor combined his classical art education with a love for gardening and architecture in 1983, just after the price of oil went down, and others started building north-facing McMansions. The red-brick houses in the riverside town of Roebling, where Mr.

Docktor has been creating murals and sculpture, do have a patina, having been built in the first decade of the 1900s. Roebling was essentially a planned community. When John A.

Roebling's Sons Co., manufacturers of steel rope for bridges, outgrew its South Trenton mill, son Charles expanded the business eight miles south. The former 250 acres of farmland and orchards was purchased for $17,000 in 1905 as the site for a new steel manufacturing facility.

Problem was, there was no housing for the workers. The Roebling Inn was the first structure built to shelter and feed employees. It served alcohol, and hence the Charles Roebling quote, above.

That Roebling, considered the father of the town named for his family, went on to have built 750 brick houses in nine different architectural styles on 100-foot wide streets lined with London Plane trees. Each had its own backyard and dwellers could grow their own vegetables. A general store, a pharmacy, an auditorium and dance floor, a bank, schools, churches and a library soon followed.

It was a kind of utopia, with the company owning the houses and renting to the workers. They emigrated from Sweden, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Czechoslovakia and Russia to work in the mill. By the 1950s, when the company was no longer as profitable, the housing was sold to the occupants and eventually the plant was shut down.

Today the town is a bedroom community and, since the RiverLINE's inception, has experienced new growth. Housing prices have exploded. The West End Corp.

purchased the old pharmacy and converted it to condominiums. Mr. Docktor was hired to paint a mural on the side of the pharmacy.

Completed in 2005 for the town's centennial celebration, it depicts six Roebling bridges and a portrait of Charles. The red brick building had originally been designed with windows all around, but at some point the old windows were boarded up with wood. In his mural, Mr.

Docktor has painted windows back brick arches with a keystone and painted the scenes into these windows. "It took twice as long to paint it because of all the people who stopped to talk to me," he says good-naturedly. Many of those he met were members of the Friends of Roebling, a combination historical society and garden club.

They commissioned him to make a life-size bronze of the town's founding father, which has just been completed and will be erected on a grassy circle not far from the mural. Born in 1948, Mr. Docktor lived in Flushing, N.

Y., until age 15, then moved to Broomall, Pa., with his family, and studied painting at Tyler School of the Arts and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Beginning in his school years, he has always supported himself by painting portraits and murals. Mr. Docktor and his wife lived in Langhorne, Pa.

, for 10 years before building their passive solar house in Hopewell. The house is actually hard to find, hidden as it is, but a sunken courtyard built from old stone found on the property and landscaped with a weeping split-leaf red maple greets visitors at the entry. Despite the modern nature of the house, it is filled with antiques and Asian artifacts, and all the doors have been salvaged from old cathedrals and gothic buildings.

Mr. Docktor explains how the house, built below the frost line, maintains the 55-degree temperature of the surrounding earth year round, and so the house only needs to be heated 15 degrees to get to 70. The southern wall is windows and the sun warms the stone floor.

The couple burns coal for supplementary heat, and there is also electrical baseboard heat that is rarely used. It should be noted that during the April 15 nor'easter, the house remained dry. In the summer, the house maintains the surrounding temperature, and an overhanging fascia keeps the sun from baking the interior.

The southern wall of windows offers not only a view of rolling countryside, but the trees Mr. Docktor has planted, now matured, water gardens with papyrus, cattails and waterlilies. Nine acres are planted with boxwoods he uses for sculpting topiaries.

Close to the window are the squiggly branches of a corylus Contorta, or corckscrew hazelnut, he uses for floral arrangements and, more recently, a lamp. In the kitchen is another light fixture he designed from a hanging pot rack. The Docktors' previous masonry home in Langhorne was not insulated and therefore difficult to heat so Mr.

Docktor dreamed of designing and building his own energy-efficient home. "Good architects have always taken advantage of the gifts of nature," he says. The walls are lined with artwork of others he collects as well as his own.

"For commissioned work I paint romantic realism, because that's what my clients want, but for myself I paint more abstract," he says. He has painted murals for, among others, the fitness center at Dow Jones corporate campus it is 30-feet wide and depicts rock climbers, swimmers, golfers and other sports figures; for the Trane Corp., a 45-foot homage to employees from engineers to assembly-line workers, forklift operators and truck drivers; and for Leonardo's Restaurant in Hamilton, a Renaissance building fa c ade.

Dana Stewart is the foundry man who cast Mr. Docktor's sculpture of Charles Roebling into bronze. Mr.

Stewart has had his shop in Lambertville since 1991, but previously worked at the Johnson Atelier, and is a noted sculptor in his own right; his whimsical animals have been exhibited at Grounds For Sculpture. Mr. Stewart, who began casting in 1975, has cast sculpture for Selma Burke, Kiki Smith, J.

Seward Johnson Jr., Peter Voulkos and Georgia O'Keeffe, among others. He has cast several pieces for Mr.

Docktor in the past five years. After completing the work in clay, Mr. Docktor brought it to Jim Mills, a mold maker in Roosevelt.

Once the rubber mold was in Mr. Stewart's hands, a plaster mother mold was made by applying wax by brush to the rubber mold. The two halves were put together and wax was poured inside to a quarter-inch thickness.

The wax mold was cut into castable sections into which molten bronze was poured. In life, Charles Roebling was 5-foot-8-inches tall, but Mr. Docktor has rendered him 6 feet.

Ultimately he will stand on a 2-foot granite pedestal. In ideal circumstances, Mr. Docktor would work from a live model, but in Roebling's case, he worked from photographs.

"It's amazing what you can see in photos the mood, the personality, the soul," says Mr. Docktor. "Charles went to great efforts to build a community and give the workers a good life.

He was an innovative engineer. "He was stately and elegant, altruistic and visionary, so I put him in a Contrapposto pose," he continues. Indeed, Roebling is standing on one leg, like Michelangelo's "David" getting ready to slay Goliath.

"He's slinging his jacket over his shoulder, getting ready to work. The flip of the jacket gives it movement." Other details include the raised wing color, stylish in its day, and a pocket watch bulging in its vest pocket.

In order to get the drapery in the clothing, Mr. Docktor asked the pizza man to model. Mr.

Docktor finds sculpture easier than painting because in sculpting, "you're working with the form itself, not an illusion. There's an immediacy to sculpture that I love." About 60 percent of his work is portrait painting, 30 percent is murals and the remaining 10 percent is sculpture.

"It's difficult to get sculpture commissions people have to be wealthy to afford something cast in bronze." To cast Charles Roebling in bronze, for example, cost $16,500, and that doesn't include the $5,000 for the rubber mold plus Mr. Docktor's fee.

Just the cost of the casting is about what Charles Roebling paid for the land he built the town on in 1905. In addition to human portraiture, Mr. Docktor gets many commissions for dogs and horses.

"I'm very fortunate in that I can make a living at this," says Mr. Docktor. "There's something very intimate about being asked to make a portrait of a loved one.

"It's up to me to put soul into whatever I do, even if I don't connect with the initial idea," he continues. "I give the client what they want but with my own twist. It's like Ray Charles singing 'American the Beautiful' if you put heart into it, it has integrity.

" For information about Morris Docktor, call (609) 737-0790. The unveiling has not yet been scheduled; for information about the unveiling, call Joseph Varga at (609) 499-0138.