The first rural hippie commune was a live-in work of art

Art · Published 20 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: In 1960, four art students traded traditional architecture for a 7-acre tract of Colorado land to build a radical experiment. They didn't just want to live together; they wanted to inhabit a continuous piece of performance art, constructing geometric domes from scavenged car roofs and scrap metal.

Founded by Gene Bernofsky, JoAnn Bernofsky, Richard Kallweit, and Clark Richert, Drop City was rooted in a concept called "Drop Art." This movement was heavily influenced by the avant-garde "happenings" of Allan Kaprow and the experimental performances of figures like John Cage and Robert Rauschenberg at Black Mountain College. The goal was to create a "synergetic" interaction between peers where the living space itself functioned as a medium for artistic innovation. The founders were students from the University of Kansas and the University of Colorado. They sought to create a live-in work of art based on their earlier academic concepts.

The community gained international notoriety in the 1960s, attracting residents from across the globe who constructed zonohedra and domes based on the architectural theories of Buckminster Fuller and Steve Baer. Their craftsmanship was significant enough to win Fuller's Dymaxion award in 1967. However, the very fame that fueled their growth also contributed to their decline; Bernofsky noted that intense national media attention eventually helped dismantle the commune's fragile social structure. The group even received a commercial from the Firesign Theatre encouraging people to send car tops to the site. The Joy Festival in June 1967 served as the peak of the commune's fame.

Internal tensions and personality conflicts eventually rendered the community's "no bosses" philosophy unsustainable. By the end of 1968, many original members moved to Boulder to form the cooperative "Criss-Cross." While Drop City was abandoned by 1979, its legacy persists through various technological and artistic offshoots, including the early solar company Zomeworks, the "61-Zone System" developed by Zometool Inc., and the discovery of cubic fusion of interpenetrating fractal tetrahedra by Richard Kallweit in the early 1980s. The site was eventually sold to a neighboring cattle rancher after being abandoned in 1979. One of the last iconic domes was only removed in the late 1990s by a truck repair facility.

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