Drop City

Drop City was a counterculture commune near Trinidad, Colorado (El Moro area), founded in 1965 and abandoned by 1973. It is the origin point for Steve Baer’s zome structures and the DrumWall precursor — his work there directly seeded Zomeworks.

Founding

Clark Richert, Gene Bernofsky, JoAnn Bernofsky, and Richard Kallweit founded Drop City in 1965 after hearing Buckminster Fuller speak at the University of Colorado. The name came from “Drop Art” — a prior performance concept involving dropping painted objects from buildings.

The commune occupied a seven-acre site and attracted idealistic residents who built communal structures, created art installations (including a motorized “Ultimate Painting” shown at the Brooklyn Museum and in Paris), and adopted playful pseudonyms. Resident population peaked at 14–20 between 1965 and 1969, after which the open-door policy and media attention drove the original founders out.

Architecture and Baer’s role

Drop City built domes from flattened automobile rooftops — a free material available at junkyards (“Car tops are a good building material. They are cheap, strong, have an excellent paint job and are available almost everywhere” — 25 cents per top in New Mexico and Colorado). The construction method is documented in Baer’s Dome Cookbook (Lama Foundation, Corrales NM; first printing 1968, third printing 1969; the archive holds a scan of the 2nd printing). From the book: Baer wrote about ways that “today’s terrifying man made world” could be improved.

Baer contributed zonohedron-based designs that proved easier to assemble than conventional Fuller-style geodesic domes. The distinction matters: geodesic domes are locked to a sphere and cannot be varied; zomes can be stretched and clustered freely. Baer’s “triple cluster complex” at Drop City was an early multi-unit zome cluster — the form that later defined the Baer House in Corrales. Gene Bernofsky described it in the documentary as “like three soap bubbles together,” each dome 30 feet in diameter, covered in “hundreds of car tops” — “I think Steve called it a triple fused rhomboicaso dodecahedron.”

The commune received a $500 Dymaxion Award from Buckminster Fuller in 1966 for its “economically poetic architecture” (Western Art & Architecture’s phrasing; Clark Richert recalls the letter’s phrase as “poetically economic architecture” — “quite a bit of money back in 1966”).

Baer’s first visit (April 1966)

The Dome Cookbook contains a journal entry from Saturday, April 1966 — Baer’s first visit to Drop City, two years before he built his cluster there:

“Forms, rebar mesh all in place to pour slab. Got my first dome — science fiction… Clark, Gene, Jo Ann, Richard. More than anything I was stunned by Drop City, who were these people?” “Seeing Drop City specially the mistakes and weak materials gave me great confidence.”

The Monday after: “Raven and Charles Allee and I poured the slab.”

The Drop City kitchen complex (three fused exploded dodecahedra) is documented in the Dome Cookbook, including the 3°26’ gap slices between the fused domes (the dihedral angle is 116°34’, not the ideal 120°). The book’s October 1966 “kitchen complex” construction note refers to Manera Nueva in Placitas, NM — a separate four-dome cluster Baer was building in the same period. Richert recalled Baer’s arrival: “Steve Baer showed up one day, jumped out of his car, and ran over to our theater dome structure, which was not covered yet, and started climbing up the dome.”

Baer’s account (August 1973)

Writing in the Tribal Messenger five years after Drop City, Baer describes finishing his cluster there in August 1968:

The triple cluster complex is finished. It is filled with flies. No one has any money. They are eating wilted vegetables thrown out from the supermarket… At dusk as we put away the hammers and shovels — there is one complex and the geodesic theater, multi-colored car tops. The buildings glow — beauty shines forth. Each evening more strongly. Peggy cooks a great meal of venison.

The “multi-colored car tops” are the flattened automobile roofs. The description captures both the poverty of the commune and Baer’s genuine aesthetic response to what they built.

Clark Richert

Richert (1941–2021) co-founded Drop City and later became a painter, pattern theorist, and educator based in Denver. His Drop City Panorama (1968, archival digital print, 72 × 28½ in.) was exhibited at the MCA Denver “West of Center” show (2011) alongside copies of Domebook One, Domebook 2, and Dome Cookbook. Drop City work also appeared in “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia” at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. MCA Denver mounted a full retrospective, “Clark Richert in hyperspace,” in 2019. He is cited by name in Baer’s Sunspots (1975): “I owe this observation to Clark Richert who has often brought up the point that the earth is flat instead of round” — suggesting an ongoing relationship between the two after Drop City ended. See Clark Richert.

What came next

Person	Post-Drop City path
Steve Baer	Founded Zomeworks in Albuquerque
Clark Richert	Painter and art educator
Gene & JoAnn Bernofsky	—
John Curl	Social worker; author, For All the People

The commune was abandoned by 1973 — the same year Baer was serializing his solar energy book in the Tribal Messenger. The seven-acre site had been taken over by a trucking company by 2009.

Significance for the archive

Drop City is where the zome form and the DrumWall precursor were first built at scale. Without Drop City:

The Dome Cookbook (1968) would not exist
The Zome Primer (1970) would have no built precedent
The Baer House (1971) would have no proven geometry
Zomeworks would have no name

The Dome Cookbook’s influence extended beyond Baer’s own work. In the Drop City documentary (dir. Joan Grossman with co-director Tom McCourt; the archive sidecar dates it c. 2002, but the 2009 Western Art & Architecture piece describes it as still in progress, so the release date is uncertain), a speaker (likely Lloyd Kahn) says: “I saw this book for $1 called the Dome Cookbook, just done on a typewriter with drawings and muddy looking photographs and I thought I could do a book like this. This was before the whole earth catalog and this obviously influenced the first whole earth catalog.” Kahn’s 2025 Substack corroborates this. The MCA Denver exhibited Domebook One, Domebook 2, and Dome Cookbook together in 2011 as documents of the same movement. See Whole Earth Catalog.

Steve Baer built the first convective air loop rock storage system at Drop City — a south-facing solar collector made from car rear windows, with river rocks as thermal mass, using natural convection to circulate warm air through the rock bed. Baer’s on-camera claim in the documentary: “It was the first convective air loop rock storage system that worked, that I know of. This is still a darn good way to use the sun. Nothing wears out.” This is the earliest documented solar heating system attributed to Baer, predating the Baer House (1971) by several years.

The archive’s thermal vision — water, sky, passive control — is Baer’s mature engineering form of ideas that first found physical expression in the commune context of recycled car tops, salvaged barrels of water, and no money.