"You don’t need to know that much, you just need to go ahead and try it out," the architect and designer Steve Baer advised readers of his seminal Dome Cookbook in 1968. He was encouraging the resourcefulness and innovation he’d found essential in his own experiments and elaborations on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic forms. But his words easily could have served as a tagline for all of the architectural efforts of the 1970s back-to-the-land movement.

Starting in the late 1960s and continuing through the 1970s, countless waves of young Americans—mostly white, well-educated, and middle-class—left the cities and suburbs and moved, often sight unseen, to the country. Some joined communes, while others preferred single-family life. All of them wanted a more tranquil existence closer to nature—but equally urgently, they wanted to learn how to grow their own food, bake their own bread, and build their own houses.

To city kids whose idea of country living was romanticized by nostalgic summer vacations and pioneers on TV shows, a huge part of the appeal of a physically-demanding "simple" life lay in its extreme contrast to the consumerism and conformity of their 1950s childhoods. What could be more a more perfect way to realize this rebellion than to live in a house that wasn’t shaped like a house? Especially if they could build it themselves? As one member of a radical Southwest commune called the Red Rockers put it, "we wanted to create a structure that didn’t remind us of anything—a new kind of space in which to create new selves."

Most had no construction experience, but they didn’t let that stop them. When my own parents left Cambridge, Massachusetts, and decided to build a house on a northern Vermont hilltop, their total lack of carpentry skills led them to consider a few relatively simple forms: yurt, A-frame, log cabin, and the one that eventually became my childhood home—a geodesic dome.

Buckminster Fuller, the polymath American architect, philosopher, inventor, and writer, patented the design for the geodesic dome in 1954. But it wasn’t for another decade that his vision of dome homes began to be embraced by the young idealistic builders who would make them one of the era’s most iconic architectures.

In fact, this nationwide wave of dome building can be traced directly back to the "go ahead and try it out" approach of a few specific individuals.

In May of 1965, a group of artists moved to a stretch of rocky desert outside of Trinidad, Colorado, to plant the seeds of a new society—and, in the meantime, to live cheaply and simply with their friends, the better to make art. They named their community Drop City. Within just a few years, hundreds and then thousands of similar experiments would spring up around the country, but at the time, Drop City stood alone. It is now widely recognized as the first hippie commune.

One of the commune’s founders, Clark Richert, had recently attended Fuller’s lecture at the 1965 World Affairs conference in Boulder. He, like so many of the other college students who attended Fuller’s lectures, had become enamored with the geodesic form and was eager to try it out himself. The only obstacle was obtaining the formula—it wasn’t until 1966 that Fuller would publish the plans for a simple "sun dome" in Popular Science. The magazine recommended that builders use it as a swimming pool cover.

Richert and his fellow Droppers, Richard Kallweit and Gene and Jo Ann Bernofsky, didn’t let this lack of plans impede them. One day, Richert and Gene Bernofsky spotted a stranger’s geodesic greenhouse and leaped a fence to take measurements, which Richert used to build a model out of drinking straws. With this as their guide, they simply started building.

One of Drop City’s central beliefs was that it was possible and necessary to "live off America’s excesses," a philosophy that encouraged dumpster diving at the local supermarket and creative scrounging to acquire the necessary building materials for their new home. When they asked their neighbors for advice, they learned that local builders favored stucco over layers of tarpaper and chicken wire. After the Droppers realized that the wire and paper weren’t adhering properly to the dome’s sloping facets, Jo Ann Bernofsky hit upon a solution: covering the surface with thousands of bottle caps.

They painted this first dome a space-age silver and moved in. "It was extremely exciting to have pulled it off," Jo Ann recalled years later. "And it was wonderful and magical to be in this space that was totally unlike any space I’d ever been in before."

Thus encouraged, Richert began thinking big. In spring 1966, he began work on a forty-foot "Theater Dome" for use in the group’s many artistic undertakings. News of this project spread to a young Fuller-obsessed inventor named Steve Baer, who decided to drive over from New Mexico and investigate. That visit, Baer’s first of many to Drop City, would turn out to be a major turning point in the history of American architecture.

Baer was immediately inspired by the Droppers’ commitment to using "waste" construction materials and, even more, by their boldness in undertaking mathematically complex architectural forms as total novices. Baer soon added his own design, the "zome," inspired by Fuller’s formula, but more flexible and better suited to combining into large living structures. Drop City eventually totaled 10 buildings in all.

As one visitor described Drop City in 1970: "Angular, unearthly, demented, like gawky igloos in a kaleidoscope…Yellow blue green red pink purple: brazen things just lying up there, coldly geodesic, looming on the little rise way out here in southern Colorado wasteland…like some Buck Rodgers Indian village, like some half-forbidding netherworld where idealistic troglodytes lurk and live in fields of candy-colored toadstools."

One of Baer’s first suggestions was to cover the domes using steel from the tops of junked cars. This combination of environmentalism, frugality, and renegade daring appealed to the Droppers immediately, though the process itself was extremely labor-intensive. Standing on the top of a rusted-out Chevy or Studebaker, they had to chop through the roof with an axe and then swing the blade in a steady motion to slice around the edge. "It was dangerous; razor-sharp axes skittering off the steel, slicing at legs," one Dropper described it. "When you hit one of the roof supports an incredible jolt travels up the axe handle and paralyzes your wrists and hands. Jagged steel edges catching clothing, tearing flesh, hands stiff, clenching, clenching. After chopping for an hour if you try to open your hands the fingers insist on closing themselves into fists again. Blisters, blisters on top of blisters, bone weary."

"Seeing Drop City, especially the mistakes and weak materials, gave me great confidence," Baer reflected later. This collaboration gave rise not only to Baer’s own geodesic-inspired "zome," but also to the first widely-read dome instruction manual—Dome Cookbook. Baer’s eccentric, over-sized, hand-lettered 1968 work was written with daring, unskilled builders in mind as its audience.