On 3 May 1965, a twenty-four-year-old artist named Clark Richert became part owner of a goat pasture in Las Animas County, Colorado, a few miles north of Trinidad. His college friend Gene Bernofsky wrote the cheque, four hundred and fifty dollars for six or seven acres of scrub with a spectacular view of mesas in every direction, and Richert paid for the water hookup. The deed transferred on his birthday. Within eighteen months the pasture held a cluster of geodesic domes sheathed in the chopped-off roofs of junked automobiles, bought from local wrecking yards at around a quarter each and cut free with an axe, and Buckminster Fuller had given the place his Dymaxion Award for genuinely poetic economy in design. Photographs of those domes ran in magazines across the country and on national television.
What the founders had built, and what they thought they were building, was a live-in work of art. They had been art students at Kansas, where they had developed a practice they called Drop Art: tying a rope to an interesting object, lowering it from a second-floor window onto the pavement, and watching what passers-by did with it. Drop City was to be the same gesture at the scale of a settlement, an artwork you could live inside, and its single organising principle was the absence of authority. As Richert put it, the only rule they had was that there were no bosses. Richard Kallweit described it more exactly still: they had no rules as such, only the rule of no rules. Eight years later the place was finished, the founders long gone, the domes leaking and unmaintained, and today the site is a weed patch. The reason is not the one usually given, and it has almost nothing to do with the sort of people who showed up, which distinguishes it sharply from the other cases in the record of communities that survived and from self-declared free zones like the settlement at Christiania.
Drop Art and the Founding of Drop City
The intellectual pedigree matters, because it explains why the founders held the position they did. Richert had become fascinated as a student by Black Mountain College and specifically by the improvised performances staged there a decade earlier by John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, and Fuller himself, and by the happenings of Allan Kaprow. What those artists shared was a conviction that art should stop being an object produced by a specialist for an audience and become an event that anybody present participates in, with no separation between performer and spectator and no authority determining what counts. Drop Art applied that to the street. Drop City applied it to a place to live.
It is worth registering how little money was involved, because it changes the character of the experiment entirely. Four hundred and fifty dollars for the land, scrap for the buildings, and no patron, no endowment, no corporate sponsor, and no institutional backing of any kind. That independence is the reason Drop City could be as uncompromising as it was, since nobody could withdraw funding over a disagreement, and it stands in complete contrast to the well-capitalised industrial utopias that failed anyway, such as the plantation city Ford built in the Amazon. The Droppers owed nobody anything, which is a genuinely rare position for a utopian project and one that removed every external constraint on how far they could take their principles.
Once you take that seriously, an admission policy becomes an aesthetic betrayal rather than a practical necessity. A happening with a guest list is not a happening; it is a performance, and the whole point of the form was to abolish the distinction between the people making the work and the people encountering it. The founders were not naive about the risks of an open door, and they were certainly not indifferent to who came, since they were building something they cared about intensely. They were committed to a proposition about art, and the proposition entailed the door. It is a genuinely radical position and considerably more coherent than the retrospective accounts allow, which is worth saying before examining what it cost, since the same seriousness underlies the more ambitious entries in the catalogue of technical and creative undertakings. Drop City was an artwork first. Everything else followed from that.
The Rule of No Rules
The governing arrangement, such as it was, deserves to be stated precisely because it was neither an oversight nor an absence of thought. There were no bosses, no assigned tasks, no schedules, no membership fee, no probationary period, no screening, no vote on admissions, and no procedure for asking anyone to leave. Anyone who arrived could stay. Anyone who wished to work could work; anyone who did not, need not. Decisions were reached by whoever happened to be interested in making them.
The absence of rules also has to be understood against what the founders were reacting to. These were young Americans in the mid-1960s who had watched their country’s institutions conduct a war, enforce a draft, and administer a racial order, and whose formative artistic influences held that authority in aesthetic matters was itself the enemy. The proposition that a group of adults could organise their common life without anyone giving orders was not a whimsical preference; it was the substantive claim the whole project existed to test, and testing it required actually doing it rather than adopting a modified version with a committee. Half-measures would have proved nothing.
For a while this functioned beautifully, and it is important to record that it functioned rather than to skip to the collapse. The core group of roughly a dozen built eight domes and geometric structures, painted, filmed, argued, produced collaborative canvases with titles like The Ultimate Painting, kept a shared bank account, pooled money and clothing and vehicles, and fed themselves. The domes were engineered as well as improvised, using triacontahedra and other zonohedra worked out on site with the architect Steve Baer, whose zome designs originated at Drop City and went on to become a recognised form. Nobody was in charge and the work got done, which is precisely the experience that convinces people the arrangement is sound, and which the record of experiments in governing without conventional authority suggests is reliably available at small scale. It worked at twelve. That is the trap.
The Cartop Domes
The construction economy is worth understanding on its own terms because it was genuinely inventive and because its limits are instructive. The materials were free or nearly so: railroad ties, discarded lumber from a nearby sawmill, and above all the roofs of scrapped cars, which are large, flat, weatherproof, pre-painted panels of sheet steel available in quantity at a wrecking yard for pocket change. The Droppers developed a technique for chopping them free efficiently and cladding a geodesic frame with them, producing structures that were warm-ish, dry-ish, cheap, and unmistakably beautiful in a way that photographed extremely well.
The domes themselves were technically better than their reputation suggests and worse than they needed to be. Fuller’s geometry is genuinely efficient, enclosing the maximum volume for the minimum material, which is exactly why it appealed to people with no money, and the Drop City structures were the first substantial application of geodesic design to ordinary domestic housing rather than to exhibition pavilions or military radomes. The persistent difficulty was sealing: a dome is a surface composed of many small panels meeting at many angles, every joint is a potential leak, and the standard flashing and roofing practices of the period had nothing to say about it. Visionary geometry has a way of running into unglamorous detailing problems of exactly this kind, a pattern familiar from ambitious proposals such as collecting solar power in orbit, and the domes leaked from the beginning.
This was salvage economics, and salvage economics has a specific structure that is easy to miss when admiring the results. It is arbitrage on somebody else’s waste stream: a local, finite, temporary supply of material that exists only because an industrial society is discarding it faster than it can be reclaimed, and it works brilliantly at small scale in a particular place at a particular moment. It does not compose into a system of production, because you cannot build a second Drop City next door on the same junkyard, and it generates no revenue, since the domes cannot be sold, only inhabited. Building at that level of ingenuity from what industry throws away has become a serious field in its own right, connected to the whole modern question of materials recovery examined in the supply chains behind industrial minerals, and the structures themselves belong in the record of what people manage to construct with almost nothing. The housing was free. The economy was not.
The Dymaxion Award
Then came the recognition, and it arrived from the top. Buckminster Fuller, whose slides Richert had seen at a lecture in Boulder and whose geometry the domes were built on, granted Drop City his Dymaxion Award in acknowledgement of what the group had achieved with almost no money. That is not a minor honour handed out casually; it is the leading figure in the field endorsing the work, and it did what such endorsements do. The domes appeared in dozens of magazine articles. Television crews came. Drop City became, within about two years of a cheque for four hundred and fifty dollars, one of the most photographed places in American counterculture.
What the coverage did, crucially, was change the meaning of the open door without changing the policy at all. In 1965 an open door was almost costless, because the property sat on a dirt road outside a small town in southern Colorado and essentially nobody knew it existed, so the number of people who might walk through it in a given month was determined by geography. By 1967 the same door was attached to one of the most publicised addresses in American counterculture, reachable by anyone with a magazine and a tank of petrol. The rule had not been amended, debated, or reconsidered. Its cost had simply been multiplied by a factor nobody controlled, which is the general property of any policy whose burden scales with how many people know about it.
The publicity was not accidental and it was not resented at the time. Peter Douthit, who arrived in 1966 and went by Peter Rabbit, was an enthusiastic promoter who understood exactly what attention could do for the project and pursued it deliberately, and he is credited with cementing Drop City’s cultural significance. He is also credited, in the same breath and by the same sources, with weakening the community by attracting too many outsiders, which is a remarkable thing to have on one’s record and a perfectly fair summary. This is the recurring dynamic by which a phenomenon becomes famous and is altered by the fame, the same feedback between coverage and behaviour visible in the study of how enthusiasms propagate through a population, and it operates identically whether the thing being celebrated is a commune or a claimed breakthrough in materials science. The award was deserved. It was also the beginning of the problem.
Forever Free and Open to All People
Here is the detail that makes Drop City unique in the entire literature, and it is a legal one. With the domes built and the community established, Gene and JoAnn Bernofsky, who were the only official owners of the property, signed it over to a non-profit corporation comprising the core group of about a dozen. The deed stipulated that the land was forever free and open to all people.
The legal form is worth dwelling on because it was chosen deliberately. Transferring the land from two individuals to a non-profit corporation held by the whole group was, in one sense, an ordinary and sensible piece of governance: it prevented any individual from selling the property out from under everyone else, and it converted a private holding into a collective one. In another sense it did something no other community in this literature has done, which is to encode the community’s most contested policy into the instrument of title, where it could survive any future change of mind by any future set of residents.
Read that again. They did not merely adopt an open-door policy; they wrote it into the title, permanently, in a form designed to bind their successors. The most radical commitment they held was made irrevocable by the instrument that transferred the property, which means that at the exact moment they formalised their ownership they eliminated their own capacity ever to close the door. It is the single most sincere act in this entire body of history and it was catastrophic, and it is worth pausing to admire the integrity of it before observing what it did. Every other community discussed in this territory retained some mechanism of admission, whether a fee, a vote, a probationary term, a register, or a price, and every one of them used it. Drop City abolished the mechanism and then encumbered the land so that it could not be restored, an arrangement whose consequences are as durable as anything recorded in the great investigations of what title documents actually commit their holders to, and which removed in advance the one lever that any authority facing a problem of numbers ultimately relies on. They meant it completely. That is why it could not be undone.
The Joy Festival
The peak arrived in June 1967. Peter Rabbit organised and nationally advertised what he called the Joy Festival, a proto-Woodstock gathering with bands and camping across the property, and hundreds of people came. By Richert’s account it was noisy and happy, full of music and drumming and dancing and a good deal of drug and alcohol consumption, and some of the residents were delighted by it while others were repelled. A number of the visitors did not leave.
The festival also illustrates a distinction that the founders had not needed to make before, between a visitor and a resident. At twelve people on a remote pasture the categories are indistinguishable, since anybody who turns up and stays a fortnight helping to build a dome simply is a member for practical purposes and the question never arises. At several hundred, arriving over a weekend for a music event, the distinction becomes the most important fact about the place, and there was no vocabulary for it, no procedure to apply it, and nobody with standing to apply one. The community discovered it needed a category it had spent two years priding itself on not having.
The founders had, in fact, set a cap on residency at around thirty, which is the detail that exposes the whole difficulty. They had recognised the problem in principle and adopted a number. What they had not done, and could not do without abandoning their central commitment, was create any mechanism by which the number might be enforced, because enforcing a cap requires somebody with the authority to tell an arriving person that they may not stay, and the founding rule was that there were no bosses. A limit without an enforcement mechanism is a preference, not a constraint. The group had also, by writing openness into the deed, made it impossible to argue that the land itself entitled them to exclude anybody, and no group can defend a boundary its own charter denies, a problem visible wherever a collective must decide who bears the cost of a shared resource, as the study of social groups and their internal bargaining makes clear. They had a number. They had no door.
What Richert Says
Honesty requires reporting a serious objection from the person best placed to make it, because the standard account of Drop City is that it was overwhelmed by freeloading hippies, and Clark Richert has spent decades saying that this is a myth. He never saw more than about forty people in residence at once, and the stable population hovered nearer fourteen. He did not leave because things had spun out of control; he left in 1968 because a doctor told him his pregnant wife needed more protein than a diet heavy on rice and beans could supply, and he expected at the time to return. The biggest problem, in his account, was simply that they never made enough money.
The later accounts describe the practical consequences without much drama. Peter Rabbit’s own retrospective book records people crashing throughout the complex, nobody knowing anybody else, and individuals staying a month or so, getting themselves a little straight, and moving on, which is a description of a hostel rather than a household. Property went missing, and theft is difficult to address in a community that has neither locks nor an authority to complain to, a category of problem that becomes almost unmanageable wherever ownership is deliberately ambiguous, as the forensic literature on losses inside trusted institutions makes clear. The domes needed continuous maintenance and got progressively less of it. None of this required anyone to be malicious.
That objection deserves to be taken at face value and then followed one step further, because the two explanations are the same explanation. An enterprise in which anyone may join, no one may be excluded, and no one can be required to contribute cannot reliably generate a surplus, and the reason is structural rather than moral. The people who build, cook, repair, and earn receive precisely what the people who do none of those things receive, and the ratio between the two groups is set by whoever happens to arrive rather than by anyone’s decision. Under those conditions the community’s income is not a function of its effort but of the composition of a population it does not select, and the shortfall Richert identifies is the direct output of the openness the founders were proudest of. The detection of contribution and its absence is one of the fundamental problems in any cooperative arrangement, biological or human, and it runs through the study of cheating and free riding in nature and the general question of how groups sustain costly cooperation examined in the science of social behaviour. It was not a mob. It was an accounting identity.
The Membrane
The mechanism, stated generally, is this: the admission boundary is the only instrument a voluntary community reliably controls, and it does almost all of the work that people attribute to culture, values, or leadership. A group cannot compel its members to be diligent, cannot easily expel the difficult, cannot make anyone care, and cannot legislate an ethos. What it can do, at the moment of entry, is require something: a payment, a vote of the existing members, a period of probation, a demonstrated skill, a house built with one’s own hands. Anything costly will serve, because the function of the requirement is not to raise revenue or to test competence but to filter for people willing to bear a cost before receiving a benefit, which is very nearly the definition of the disposition a community needs.
There is a second function the membrane performs that is easy to overlook, which is that it makes the community legible to itself. If there is a moment of admission, then at any given time there exists a list of members, a known number, and a shared understanding of who is responsible for what, and all of the ordinary machinery of accountability becomes possible: rotas, budgets, obligations, and the mild social pressure that does most of the work in any functioning group. Without that moment there is no list, no number, and no way to distinguish the people the community is for from the people who are currently standing on it, which makes every question of contribution unanswerable in principle. Organisations that lose track of who is inside them lose the ability to manage anything else, a failure documented at length in the anatomy of institutions that could not account for themselves.
Price is the version of this that people who dislike hierarchy usually find tolerable, since it screens without anyone having to make a judgement about anyone, which is why so many nominally open institutions are in practice sorted by cost. Drop City would not use price and would not use a vote, because both reintroduce the authority the project existed to abolish, and having rejected every available membrane it was left with a community whose composition was determined entirely by external traffic. That is not a criticism of the people who arrived, most of whom were perfectly decent, and it does not require anyone to have behaved badly; a group with free entry and no expulsion will drift toward the average of whoever is passing, whatever the average happens to be. The transmission and maintenance of a shared practice depends on there being someone to transmit it to who has committed to receiving it, a requirement that runs through the study of how knowledge and custom pass between generations. The membrane is the institution. Everything else is decoration.
Libre
The control experiment exists, which is what makes Drop City so useful, and it was run by the same people three years later and forty miles away. In 1968 Dean and Linda Fleming, artists from New York’s Park Place Gallery, together with Peter Rabbit and his wife Judy, both refugees from Drop City, established a community called Libre on three hundred and sixty acres in the Upper Huerfano Valley near Gardner, Colorado. Linda Fleming, aged twenty-two, built the first structure, a forty-foot geodesic dome engineered from six decimal figures scribbled on a scrap of brown paper by a Drop City member.
The requirement is elegant precisely because it is not a judgement of character. Nobody at Libre has to assess whether an applicant is sincere, hardworking, or ideologically sound, which is exactly the kind of authority the counterculture found intolerable and which generates endless conflict wherever it is attempted. Instead the requirement is a fact about behaviour: build a house, which takes months, costs money and labour, produces something that cannot be taken away when you leave, and is entirely impossible to fake. Anyone willing to do it has demonstrated the disposition the community needs, and has done so without anyone having to sit in judgement on anyone.
Everything about Libre is recognisably the same project: the same region, the same decade, the same counterculture, the same Fuller-derived architecture, several of the same people. The difference is at the door. Libre does not admit anybody who turns up; prospective members are invited, and one of its very few rules is that accepted members must build their own houses, which is about as expensive an entry signal as it is possible to design, requiring months of labour and a permanent commitment before anyone gains anything. The structures and the land cannot be sold. Libre was founded explicitly as an antidote to the prevailing commune approach of the time, and the two experiments have been examined together in the Colorado state historical society’s account of the region’s communes. Drop City was finished within a decade. Libre is in its fifty-seventh year.
Drop City in 2026
The physical site is gone. The founders left between 1967 and 1968, the Bernofskys first and Richert in 1968, and Peter Rabbit departed a couple of years later for Libre. Conditions deteriorated through the early 1970s, the improvised domes proved unequal to Colorado winters without constant maintenance that fewer and fewer people were willing to perform, and the community dissolved around 1973. The land was eventually sold and the structures came down; the last of them collapsed within the past couple of decades, and a visitor today looking for Drop City near Trinidad will be directed to a patch of weeds, an outcome documented in the Art Institute of Chicago’s holding of Joel Sternfeld’s photograph of the ruins, whose curatorial note observes that by the time the community decided to abandon its open-door policy, it was already too late.
The intellectual output, by contrast, propagated enormously. The dome-building movement of the late 1960s and 1970s ran substantially through Drop City, and the Whole Earth Catalog carried its methods to an audience of hundreds of thousands. Steve Baer took the zome out of the goat pasture and built a company around it, becoming a significant figure in passive solar design. The founders themselves regrouped, with several starting the Criss-Cross artists’ cooperative in Boulder in 1968 on the same synergetic no-bosses principle, and Richert had a long and serious career as a painter. And the aesthetic has proved durable to the point of ubiquity, in an era when improvised, salvaged, sensor-laden structures are being built everywhere with tools including autonomous survey and construction equipment that the Droppers would have regarded with delight. The place is an address that no longer contains anything. The ideas are everywhere.
The Door They Could Not Close
Strip Drop City to its structure and the failure was not a failure of character, competence, or seriousness, and it was certainly not a failure of imagination. Four art students bought a goat pasture for the price of a used sofa, invented a form of architecture, won the endorsement of the most celebrated designer alive, and produced an aesthetic that fifty years later remains instantly legible. What they did not do, and specifically refused to do on grounds they had thought about carefully, was retain any means of deciding who belonged, and they were sufficiently sincere about it to write the refusal into the deed so that no future occupant could reverse it.
The test this suggests can be applied to any voluntary association before it opens. Ask what a prospective member must do to join, and whether the answer is anything at all. Ask who is empowered to say no, and what happens if that person is unavailable or unwilling. Ask whether the cost of the admission policy depends on how many people have heard of the place, because if it does, then success in attracting attention is the same event as the failure of the policy. And ask what the community would do if it changed its mind, which at Drop City was the one question the deed had already answered.
The consequence was not an invasion, whatever the legend says. It was subtler and more inexorable: a community whose composition was determined by publicity rather than by choice, whose most committed members received no more than its least, and which therefore could not accumulate either money or maintenance, and dissolved not with a crisis but with a slow decline in the number of people willing to fix the roof. The same founders, given a second attempt, built something at Libre with an invitation and a house-building requirement at its entrance, and that community is still there. That contrast is why Drop City belongs among the genuinely instructive entries in the catalogue of utopian societies rather than among the merely picturesque ones. They understood that an open door was the most generous thing they owned. They did not notice it was also the only lock.