R. Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, and inventor best known for the geodesic dome. His work is a recurring background presence in the archive — as the structural tradition Baer explicitly departed from, as the intellectual lineage behind the New Communalist counterculture, and as the institutional figure who awarded Drop City its Dymaxion Award.
Fuller appears three ways in the archive:
1. The structural foil. The Zome Primer (1970) opens with an explicit comparison of zomes and geodesic domes that frames Baer's work as a conscious departure:
A geodesic dome is always part of a sphere — its floor is always a circle — any variation would destroy the structural properties of the geodesic dome. It is complicated in structure and simple in shape. Zomes are simple in structure and complicated in shape.
Baer's zonohedron-based designs proved easier to assemble at Drop City than conventional Fuller geodesics. The zome word was coined partly to protect against people calling Baer's structures "geodesic domes and Fuller type domes." (Dome Cookbook, p. 24.)
2. The intellectual lineage. Kayatekin's 2025 academic paper places Baer within the New Communalist thread of the American counterculture — the strand that sought to reshape society through material invention rather than political struggle, "tracing through Buckminster Fuller's ambition to redistribute technology extracted from the military-industrial complex." Fuller is the upstream figure in the genealogy: Fuller → New Communalism → Baer.
3. The institutional validator. Baer's first documented encounter with Fuller: October 1963 in London — Baer buys Fuller's untitled Epic Poem. In Dome Cookbook Baer is skeptical: "bought Fuller's Epic Poem in London Oct 1963; skeptical of geodesic dome attribution; coined 'sounds like a hair oil' about 'Omni Directional Halo.'" The admiration is real but critical from the start.
Drop City founders Clark Richert, Gene Bernofsky, and JoAnn Bernofsky founded the commune in 1965 after hearing Fuller speak at the University of Colorado. The commune received a $500 Dymaxion Award from Fuller for its "economically poetic architecture." This is the connection that brought Baer to Drop City — he arrived in 1966 to a community that had been endorsed by the most famous builder of his era, and proceeded to show that his zonohedra were structurally superior to Fuller's geodesics.
The LBL Appropriate Energy Technology Library Bibliography (Hannah R. Clark, 1979) shelved Baer's Zome Primer alongside The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller as co-equal design references in the DOE-funded library — the federal government's implicit grouping of the two as parallel contributions.
Jonathan Rinck's 2019 Detroit Art Review piece on Oscar Tuazon explicitly names Baer, Fuller, and Stewart Brand as "first-generation environmentalists" whose publications inspired Tuazon's work. The lineage is stated as Fuller → Baer → Tuazon: Baer is described as "the next generation" relative to Fuller, and Tuazon as "the next generation" relative to Baer.