Dome Architecture: Drop City and Beyond

Clark Richert Drop City Panorama, 1968
Archival digital print, 72 x 28 1/2 in
Courtesy the artist

Geodesic-based dome architecture was a persistent element of the counterculture landscape in the West. Over 2,000 rural communes were formed in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and the iconic Drop City, near Trinidad, Colorado, was the first of them to use domes.
Originally inspired by the visionary ideas of Buckminster Fuller and Steve Baer, dome structures became a big part of the counterculture mythos. With lattice forms that appeared to align with natural geometries, domes provided a more organic alternative to the mechanistic structures of modern cities and the artificiality of the 90-degree angle. Triggered in part by international media coverage of Drop City, dome architecture proliferated in the period as an efficient, accessible, and liberating building format.

Publications
A number of publications about dome living were created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including Domebook One, Domebook 2, and the Dome Cookbook, all of which feature in West of Center. In the Dome Cookbook, Steve Baer wrote about ways that "today's terrifying man made world" could be improved. The Dome Cookbook encouraged the construction of domes through the scrounging of pre-existing materials, such as car tops.

Dome Cookbook

Steve Baer

Dome Cookbook (Corrales, NM: Lama Foundation, 1969)

Third printing of how-to manual, 11 1/4 x 15 in

Courtesy the artist

Steve Baer Car tops, p21.

From Dome Cookbook (Corrales, NM: Lama Foundation, 1969)

Third printing of how-to manual, 11 1/4 x 15 in

Courtesy the artist