Drop City

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Drop City was an artists' community that formed in southern Colorado in 1965. Abandoned by the early 1970s, it became known as the first rural "hippy commune"¹.

Image:DropCity.jpg

1 Establishment
2 Legacy
3 References
4 Footnotes

[edit] Establishment

In 1965, the four original founders, Gene & JoAnn Bernofsky, Richard Kallweit and Clark Richert, art students and filmmakers from the University of Kansas and University of Colorado, moved to a seven acre tract of land near Trinidad, in south eastern Colorado. Their intention was to create a live-in work of Drop Art, continuing an art concept they had developed earlier at the University of Kansas. Drop Art (sometimes called "droppings") was informed by the "happenings" of Allan Kaprow and the impromptu performances, a few years earlier, of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and Buckminster Fuller, at Black Mountain College.

As Drop City gained notoriety in the 1960s underground, people from around the world came to stay and work on the construction projects. Inspired by the architectural ideas of Buckminister Fuller and Steve Baer, residents constructed domes and zonahedra to house themselves, using geometric panels made from the metal of automobile roofs and other inexpensive materials. In 1967 the group, now consisting of 10 core people, won Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion award for their constructions.

Soon the community grew in reputation and size, accelerated by media attention, including news reports on national television networks. With the complex of eight domes and geometric buildings constructed, the original occupants of the community moved to Boulder, Colorado to start an artists' cooperative, "Criss-Cross", whose purpose, like Drop City's, was to function in a "synergetic" interaction between peers (no bosses) to create experimental artistic innovation. Among the innovative endeavors to evolve out of Drop-City are:

in 1969, the early solar energy company - Zomeworks, in Albuquerque, NM;
the artists' group "Criss-Cross, operative in New York and Colorado in the 1970s;
the development of the "61-Zone System" by ZomeTool of Boulder, Colorado;
and in the early 1980s, an important discovery of a cubic fusion of interpenetrating fractal tetrahedra by Richard Kallweit.

[edit] Legacy

By 1970, Southern Colorado and Northern New Mexico were littered with intentional communities, some which sprang up on their own, and some which were inspired by Drop City. Libre, north of Gardner, Colorado and founded by several ex-"Droppers", was among the more well known, and some continue to exist in some form today.

At Drop City, debris and building remnants from the original settlement remain at the site today, though it is not inhabited. The property is currently used as farm land.

[edit] References

Miller, Timothy. (1991). The Hippies and American Values. University of Tennessee Press. ISBN 0870496948.
Rabbit, Peter. (1971). Drop City. The Olympia Press, Inc. Review
John Q McDonald --- 21 July 2006

http://sprg.ssl.berkeley.edu/~jmcd/book/revs3/dcty.html