Drop City

The artists' commune near Trinidad, Colorado (1965-1973) — the first residential use of geodesic domes, recipient of Fuller's inaugural Dymaxion Award, and the place where his geometry entered the counterculture.

Drop City was founded in 1965 on a seven-acre plot near Trinidad, Colorado, by Gene Bernofsky, JoAnn Bernofsky, Richard Kallweit, and Clark Richert. Kallweit and Richert had heard Fuller speak at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and carried his geodesic ideas to the mesa. With almost no building experience but considerable ingenuity, the founders constructed domes from salvaged materials — culled lumber, bottle caps, and chopped-out car tops. The structures cost nearly nothing and demonstrated that Fuller's geometry could be built by anyone with determination and scrap. In 1966 Fuller himself honored the commune with his inaugural Dymaxion Award for "poetically economic structural accomplishments."

At its peak Drop City housed fourteen to twenty inhabitants and attracted international attention as the first rural commune of the 1960s and the proving ground of the owner-built dome. Steve Baer developed his zome — a zonohedral building form derived from Fuller's geometry — at Drop City before founding Zomeworks in New Mexico, carrying the experiment into the passive-solar industry. But the flood of visitors and media attention led to overcrowding, and by 1973 Drop City had been abandoned to transients, becoming what one observer called "the world's first geodesic ghost town." Its legacy persists in the dome-building movement, the appropriate-technology movement, and Joan Grossman's 2012 documentary Drop City.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — awarded Drop City the Dymaxion Award
• Clark Richert (Clark Richert) — co-founder and geometric artist
• Steve Baer (Steve Baer) — developed the zome at Drop City
• Zomeworks (Zomeworks) — Baer's company, carrying Drop City experiments forward
• Drop City (organization) (Drop City) — organizational entity article
• Frameless Geodesic Dome (Frameless Geodesic Dome) — another owner-built dome tradition
• Geodesic Dome — the full dome history, including the counterculture movement Drop City exemplifies

Sources

• 2026-08-11-fuller-places-research.md — research compilation of significant Fuller-associated places
• 2026-06-30-about-drop-city.md — Drop City documentary website content