Steve Baer (born 1938, died May 17, 2024, age 85) was an engineer, inventor, and writer based in Corrales and Albuquerque, New Mexico, and the co-founder of Zomeworks Corporation. He is the primary figure in the archive — every major technical idea in the wiki originates with him.
Education and early life: Attended Midland School (boarding school), where he read Lewis Mumford and developed philosophical views about technology's role in human life. Then UCLA and Amherst College, then US Army (enlisted 1960, served in Germany), then ETH Zurich (engineering and metal welding). Baer on his own education: "I never quite fit into that whole college thing."
Baer's own account (50th Amherst reunion, c.2010): he left Amherst in 1957, worked at an aircraft company, took some semesters at UCLA, returned to Amherst for a full year, worked in the Bakersfield oil fields, left Amherst again after conflict, then US Army in Germany — where he married Holly. He later studied at ETH Zurich (engineering and metal welding).
In 1965 he relocated to Albuquerque, first working for Fruehauf Trailer Services, then as a surveyor and welder. In 1968 he moved to Corrales and began experiments with dome structures. In 1969 he co-founded Zomeworks with Barry Hickman and Ed Heinz.
Transformative reading: Baer credited Farrington Daniels' Direct Use of the Sun's Energy (Yale, 1964) as the spark for his solar work: "It's simply surprising when you take these dead materials...and suddenly! In the middle of winter!–there's warmth." (MEN, July 1973)
Kayatekin's 2025 academic paper places Baer within the New Communalist thread of the American counterculture — the strand that sought to reshape society through material invention rather than political struggle, tracing through Buckminster Fuller's ambition to redistribute technology extracted from the military-industrial complex.
Corrales, New Mexico was his base for his entire working life. He built his own house there in 1971 as a cluster of "zomes" (zone-dome polyhedra), which became the first full-scale testbed for the drum wall, Skylid louvers, and reflector/shade panels.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1965 | Moves to Albuquerque; works as surveyor and welder |
| Dec 1964 | Holly makes first rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron model in Zurich (grandmother's attic floor) — origin of zonohedra research |
| Spring 1965 | Working on zonohedra geometry in Albuquerque |
| Apr 1966 | First visit to Drop City — "stunned by Drop City, who were these people?" |
| Oct 1963 | Buys Fuller's untitled Epic Poem in London (first encounter with Fuller) |
| Early 1968 | Dome Cookbook published — credited by Lloyd Kahn as "the first flash of insight" for Domebook One and by Stewart Brand as a direct influence on the Whole Earth Catalog |
| c. 1967–68 | Builds first convective air loop rock storage system at Drop City — south-facing solar collectors from car rear windows, river rock thermal mass, air convection loop. On-camera claim in Drop City documentary: "It was the first convective air loop rock storage system that worked, that I know of." |
| 1968 | Moves to Corrales; builds first zome cluster at Drop City |
| Oct 1968 | Attends first solar energy conference (Palo Alto, ~65 attendees) — Harold Hay was active in passive cooling at this time (Phoenix prototype built 1967); both moved in the same solar conference circuit |
| 1969 | Co-founds Zomeworks with Barry Hickman and Ed Heinz |
| Fall 1969 | Zomeworks participates in the Peradam gathering (near Santa Barbara) — ARC/SRI researchers + countercultural organizations including Portola and Hog Farm. Engelbart and Bill English visit Baer at the Libre commune, NM. Fred Turner (2006): Baer described as "the Whole Earth Catalog's foremost authority on geodesic domes." |
| 1971 | Builds the Baer House in Corrales — zome cluster, drum wall, Skylid, Sunbender. Skylid work begins. |
| Dec 1972 | Quoted by Stewart Brand in Rolling Stone "Spacewar": "Every time I think of that place I start to scratch my balls. It makes me nervous," on Xerox PARC / Stanford Research Park — "recalling that most of the evil he knows has emitted from similar ivory towers." Brand identifies him as "dome and solar designer Steve Baer from dusty Albuquerque." |
| 1972 | Co-founds New Mexico Solar Energy Association with Peter Van Dresser and Ken Haggard at Ghost Ranch; hosts first "Life Technic" conference. Paul Davis House, Corrales — air-loop rock storage. |
| 1973 | Monte Vista School, Albuquerque — greenhouse. Serializes solar physics book in the Tribal Messenger (March–October) |
| 1978 | Benedictine Monastery, Pecos — drum wall and clerestory |
| 1988 | Andy Shack test building established at Zomeworks yard, Albuquerque |
| Aug 1999 | Switches prototype from wall radiators to rooftop radiators — key Cool Cell step |
| 2000 | Cool Cell publicly described in the ABQ Journal; writes Corrales Comment irrigation column; "CO₂ and Global Warming" and "Sunny Days Ahead!" essays |
| 2002 | Dense engineering period: Cool Cell brochure, di-thermal roofs, pool-heater cooling, storage, heated-vs-unheated plates experiments |
| Spring 1973 | Visits US Patent Office, Crystal City, VA; attends NSF solar meeting, Washington DC (March) |
| Summer 1974 | Publishes "Gravity Engines and the Diving Engine," Coevolution Quarterly, pp. 80-87 |
| June 1975 | Publishes Sunspots: Collected Facts and Solar Fiction (Zomeworks Corporation); receives Skylid US Patent 3,884,414 |
| 2004 | Sunmen manifesto (May); Bruce Davis studio Double Play installation (August); Dear Shareholders letter, US Patent 6,357,512 B1, $93K capital raise (September) |
| 2009 | Presents NM passive solar survey to AIA Albuquerque chapter (January) |
| 1995 | Work featured in Contemporary Developments in Design Science exhibit, St. John the Divine Cathedral, New York City |
| 2010 | Receives UNESCO Global Award for Sustainable Architecture |
| 2012 | Publishes More Sunspots (Zomeworks) |
| 2018 | Writes "Harold Hay's influence and the Zomeworks Corporation" — chapter 4 of Activism in Architecture: Bright Dreams of Passive Energy Design (eds. McDonald & Dayer, Routledge) — formal academic acknowledgment of Hay as upstream influence on Zomeworks thermal work |
| May 17, 2024 | Dies in Corrales, age 85 |
| Product | Description |
|---|---|
| DrumWall | Water-filled drums behind south-facing glazing for thermal mass storage |
| Skylid® | Freon-actuated insulated louvers that open in sun and close at night — no electricity, since 1973 |
| Sunbender® | Mirrored reflector/shade panels that direct winter sun inward and provide summer shade |
| Cool Cell™ | Architectural passive climate-control: water reservoirs in ceiling, roof radiator/absorbers, five operating modes |
| Double Play™ | Dual-function thermosiphon heating and cooling from the same roof hardware |
| Zometool | 31-zone truss system marketed commercially; adopted by scientists for quasicrystal and symmetry demonstrations; Jose Baer considers it "possibly his father's most significant work" |
| Playground climbers | Zome-geometry play structures sold nationwide |
| Osmotic heat pipe | Patented; designed for zero-gravity environments. US Patent 3,561,525 |
| Stock pond melter | Keeps ice hole open for livestock; US Patent 3,618,569 |
Full patent portfolio:
Named in the archive: wife Holly Baer (also deceased, 2025); son Jose Baer (the Amherst memorial, co-written by Jose himself, confirms his name; the Corrales Comment obituary erroneously named "son Steve"); daughter Audrey (died c.2018, lung cancer; children Tess and Hannah Johnson); grandchildren Isaac and Sophia Baer; brother William Baer.
Zomeworks co-founders: Barry Hickman and Ed Heinz (c.1970). Zomeworks staff: David Harrison (VP, 12+ years), Tim James (installer), Bill Mingenbach (ceiling tanks), Joe Minella (boogie valves), Shawn Buckley (di-thermal walls), Bristol Stickney (heated-vs-unheated plates), Jesse Rodefer (Cool Cell spokesman). Post-death: Zomeworks passed to sole ownership of Benjamin Rodefer (Wikipedia, 2024; relationship to Jesse Rodefer unknown). NMSEA co-founders: Peter Van Dresser and Ken Haggard (1972). ISES: served on board of directors, US Section of the International Solar Energy Society. Solar Fools: Bruce W. Davis, Karen Terry. State researcher: Mark Chalom (NSRC 2006).
Baer was anti-subsidy, anti-certification, and contemptuous of institutional solar advocacy. From Sunmen (2004): "One can no more subsidize the sun than heat it up." He described the Energy Foundation as "a tow truck with no tow chain, just a bigger horn to increase alarm." He rejected green building point systems, Earth Day, and "tax credit engineers who need no forklifts, hammers, shovels or cement truck."
His preferred instrument was the infrared scanner: "this tool, which measures the temperature of a surface instantly by merely pointing at it, leaves a stream of questions for its user that becomes a Sunman's education." His preferred model for adoption was epidemiological: "Let us hope we can begin a new epidemic of passive design. Surely the passive solar virus has mutated and the epidemic will reach larger populations."
The archive's central claim — that passive thermal systems based on water, sky radiation, and radiant comfort can do all the cooling and most of the heating in climates like Albuquerque — was Baer's life's work. It was independently validated by Chalom's state field study (2006), Davis's built practice (1975–2017), and Kayatekin's academic paper (2025), but never adopted at scale. See Why hasn't passive thermal scaled?
Two Baer essay titles not otherwise catalogued appear in Clément Gaillard's French anthology An Anthology for Understanding Low-Tech (T&P Work Unit, afterword by Philippe Bihouix), which includes their first French translations:
Both emphasize "free services provided by the climate" — aligned with the anti-subsidy, passive-first worldview in Sunmen (2004).