MCA Denver Blog — November 9, 2011
Source URL: https://mcadenver.blogspot.com/2011/11/dome-architecture-drop-city-and-beyond.html
Part of the "West of Center" exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver.
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.
Baer is placed alongside Fuller as co-originator of the dome counterculture — not as a follower but as a parallel "visionary." This framing appears in a museum exhibition context (2011), outside the technical documentation sphere.
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.
This is the only known direct quote from Dome Cookbook in the archive. The car-top construction method is the same technique used at Drop City (flattened automobile roofs as zome panels).
The exhibition caption reads:
Steve Baer, Dome Cookbook (Corrales, NM: Lama Foundation, 1969) Third printing of how-to manual, 11¼ × 15 in. Courtesy the artist.
This confirms:
Clark Richert, Drop City Panorama, 1968. Archival digital print, 72 × 28½ in. Courtesy the artist. This panoramic view of Drop City is the primary visual reference for the commune's dome cluster (a different format from the photographs in the archive's other Drop City sources).
"West of Center" featured: Domebook One, Domebook 2, and Dome Cookbook — the three major dome construction manuals of the era.
Source: MCA Denver Blog, "Dome Architecture: Drop City and Beyond," November 9, 2011.
URL: https://mcadenver.blogspot.com/2011/11/dome-architecture-drop-city-and-beyond.html