Drop City, Libre, and Domes

I just read a very interesting book titled "Huerfano" by Roberta Price, a memoir of the years she lived at Libre, a commune in the Colorado mountains near Walsenburg. It brought back memories of my brief visit to Libre in the summer of 1973 with my husband and five-year-old son, Patrick.

In 1972 we bought a 3-acre property in rural Colorado and pondered whether to raze the old farmhouse or remodel it. Bob designed houses for a living back then so it was logical that he would draft several designs before settling on one that would fit our needs and budget. I thought we'd agreed on a wrap-around addition to the 24'x24' story-and-a-half farm house until the day he told me about geodesic domes. Next thing I knew he and a friend had crafted a scale model of a dome out of balsa wood and hot glue and were talking of nothing else. While we considered, designed, and dreamed we bought a 14'x53' mobile home and parked it next to the old farmhouse. This was to be our home for the next few years - more years than we like to admit.

The summer of '73 we decided to take a little vacation to Taos, New Mexico and along the way visit Drop City, a commune near Trinidad, Colorado, where the hippies fabricated geodesic domes from car tops hacked out with axes and welded into triangles to create hexagons and pentagons. The place was deserted by then, having reached its zenith a few years before.

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In reading the book "Domebook 2" Bob learned of the Libre community in the mountains sixty-five miles northwest of Drop City near Gardner, Colorado. This was the place where many of the Droppers migrated to after Drop City self-destructed. We had both read Peter Rabbit's book "Drop City" and knew that he was now living at Libre, an experiment in communal living. We drove the unpaved roads to that community one bright summer day, stayed a couple of hours and talked to people there who were building a small school, then followed that same road back to the interstate highway and headed south to Capulin volcano without seeing the 40-foot dome the Red Rockers had built near Libre. I'm not sure what we were looking for at Libre but we found nothing to ever take us back there.

We parked in the visitors' parking area at Capulin Monument and hiked to the rim where we perched long enough to take a few photographs then returned to our car and headed south over Raton Pass and along the winding roads into Taos, New Mexico.

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In 1973 Taos was still a quiet town known for its artists and the Taos Pueblo. We visited the pueblo, ate fresh hot bread baked in a horno, bought beads from a little Native American girl, and were invited inside a second-story room in the pueblo. I'm told that tourists are no longer allowed inside the pueblo so I feel prvileged to have seen it in 1973. We also walked through the streets in town and stopped in at many art and book shops. But our focus was on the new and innovative architecture and house construction on the outskirts of town. We toured a home being built of empty aluminum cans. The air trapped within the cans was to provide the insulation and the cylindrical shape was to provide the strength.

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We came back home from that vacation ready and eager to build our own dome. Bob decided on a 5/8, three frequency alternate dome. He also decided to attach it to the existing farmhouse. I had lobbied for that as I loved the old fir floors in the house and had a sentimental attachment to the house. Bob has said many times over the years that if he had it to do over he would never have opted to attach the dome to the old house for it was a very difficult thing to do. As a dome is built, layer upon layer of triangles, the walls shift. But Bob had attached the lower walls of the dome to the old house which did not allow for shifting. After fighting it for awhile he finally detached the dome walls and cut openings in the old house which allowed him to march the freestanding dome walls right though the old house. When the dome was complete only then did he go back and secure the walls to the existing house.

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Building the dome became a lifestyle for us. We scrounged for building materials and traded Bob's talents in design for bricklaying, electrical work, and more. Bob built the dome with the help of various friends after hours, for we both held full time jobs. It took years. There are so many stories I could tell about those years of building the house. The insulation story is one of my favorites. But I'll save that for another blog.

We moved in before the house was complete. That may have been a mistake for once we were in the construction slowed to a snail's pace. We were low on money and enthusiasm. So we learned to live with unfinished walls and no wall cabinets in the kitchen. And we joked with friends about when the house would be finished, but it weighed heavily on Bob, not much of a joke to him. Over the next few years he added a greenhouse to the south side of the old farm house, enlarged the east-facing deck, converted the deck off the bedroom to a sloped roof over the entryway and added a front porch. He also removed two triangular windows on the east wall of the dome and framed that space in, something he'd been threatening to do for years because the sunshine that streamed through those windows each morning made eating breakfast at the table an unpleasant experience.

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Now the year is 2011; it's been thirty-eight years since we made that trip to Drop City and Libre but Roberta Price's book brought it all back to me, the promise of building a unique home inexpensively and quickly, one that would envelop us in an atmosphere of good energy and creative vibes, and a home we could build ourselves. We did it and I've enjoyed the entire experience. We both love our little dome home on the Colorado prairie.