A zome is a man-made structure derived from zonohedra — convex polyhedra whose faces are parallelograms arranged in parallel zones. Baer's word fuses "zone" and "dome." The definition in his own words, from Zome Primer (1970):
A Zome is a man-made structure derived from zonohedra. The zones of the zonohedron may be stretched or shrunk or removed to produce, if desired, an asymmetric dome shaped structure. Zomes may be single or clustered. Zomes can cluster together like soap bubbles.
The zome is the form that gave Zomeworks its name, that shaped the Baer House, and that Baer built at Drop City in 1968. It is his most publicly recognized contribution — the 2025 Kayatekin academic paper notes that mainstream discourse on Baer focused on "zomes and Drum Wall," rather than the thermal work the wiki covers.
The Zome Primer opens with an explicit comparison:
A geodesic dome is always part of a sphere—a low bubble or a high bubble—its floor is always a circle—any variation would destroy the structural properties of the geodesic dome. The geodesic dome, if it is large and composed of many edges and joints, has many different edge lengths. It is complicated in structure and simple in shape. Zomes are simple in structure and complicated in shape.
The geodesic dome cannot be varied without losing its structural logic. The zome can be stretched, shrunk, or joined to other zomes freely — because its structural logic lives in the parallel zones, not in a sphere approximation. Every zone can be stretched independently without changing any angles. Different zomes of different sizes can fuse through shared skew hexagons to form compound clusters.
A zonohedron is a convex solid whose faces are polygons with edges in equal and parallel pairs. Every edge belongs to a zone — a band of parallel edges encircling the solid. The number of face planes for an n-zone system is n(n−1)/2.
The key zonohedra for zome construction:
| Zonohedron | Zones | Faces | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rhombic Dodecahedron | 4 | 12 | Simplest; 4 cells |
| Rhombic Triacontahedron | 6 | 30 | Main zome unit; 20 cells |
| Enneacontahedron | 10 | 90 | Larger clusters; 120 cells |
The triacontahedron (30-face, 6-zone) is the standard zome unit. Two triacontahedra fuse through a shared skew hexagon. A triple cluster adds a third. The Baer House is a multi-unit cluster of triacontahedra connected this way.
Origin of the word "zome": The Dome Cookbook (p. 24) records the coinage: Baer and Durkee (Steve Durkee, counterculture artist associated with the Lama Foundation) agreed the structures "really were not domes because they are not symmetrical. Stretching the zones of a zonahedra makes it asymmetrical. Durkee said 'they are zones.'" Baer was "very excited by this word." He kept waking up that night with it. The word spread because it protected the builders against people calling their structures "geodesic domes and Fuller type domes."
Earliest date: December 1964, Zurich — Holly Baer made a rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron on the attic floor of her grandmother's house in Switzerland. This predates Drop City by nearly four years.
The Zome Primer's main structural innovation is a system based on 31 lines through the center of an icosahedron:
This produces six section types (R, S, T, V, X, Y) and 242 possible face planes. Baer filed the patent on this structural system (filed May 4, 1970, three months before the Primer's August 1970 publication) — US Patent 3,722,153, issued March 27, 1973; Canadian equivalent CA949279A. The Primer referred to it as "patent applied for, assigned to Zomeworks Corporation." He compared it to its predecessors — the 12-zone octet truss and the 13-zone MERO space grid — and argued the 31-zone system offers more geometric flexibility than either.
Hardware: A lines = 40″, C lines = 42″. The 6-zone aluminum joint was made by Otto Jung of Design Industries, Albuquerque. Ball-and-threaded-hole joints are ideal; flange joints cheaper but require careful design to avoid orientation errors.
Paul Hildebrandt, who describes himself as a 45-year developer of Baer's 31-zone system, founded Zometool Inc. — an educational toy company that commercialized the 31-zone geometry as a physical construction kit. The Zometool ball-and-strut system maps directly onto the A/B/C line framework: struts come in three types corresponding to the three line families, and the ball has a hole for each of the 31 directions. The result is a manipulable model of the same geometric space Baer's patent covers.
Zometool is distinct from Zomeworks — the names share the same root (Baer's "zome"), but Zometool is a commercial education product company while Zomeworks is a passive solar engineering company. Hildebrandt is now a key member of Solar Fools, connecting the geometry lineage to the ongoing CoolSky work.
Steve Durkee, the USCO artist and Lama Foundation member who co-coined "zome" with Baer, is documented in Turner (2006) as having begun visiting Douglas Engelbart's ARC offices (Stanford Research Institute) around 1969 — the same period he was collaborating with Baer. This places the word origin of "zome" inside the early counterculture-computing network that Stewart Brand was brokering between the commune movement and Bay Area computer research.
Baer built his first zome clusters at Drop City, a counterculture commune near Trinidad, Colorado, founded in 1965 by Clark Richert, Gene Bernofsky, and JoAnn Bernofsky. The commune received a $500 Dymaxion Award from Buckminster Fuller for its "economically poetic architecture." Baer's zonohedron-based designs proved easier to assemble than conventional Fuller geodesics — an early demonstration of the zome's practical advantage over the dome.
Baer's account of finishing his cluster there, from the August 1973 Tribal Messenger (written about August 1968):
The triple cluster complex is finished. It is filled with flies... At dusk as we put away the hammers and shovels — there is one complex and the geodesic theater, multi-colored car tops. The buildings glow — beauty shines forth.
The "multi-colored car tops" are flattened automobile roofs, the panel material Drop City used. The construction method is documented in Baer's earlier book Dome Cookbook (Lama Foundation, New Mexico, 1968).
Built in Corrales, New Mexico in 1971, the Baer House is a cluster of connected zomes — not a single unit. The photographs show the triangulated aluminum panel roofline, multiple connected zome units, and the Sandia Mountains in the background. The south-facing facets of the cluster geometry create the solar collection zone in front of the drum wall thermal mass.
The zome form is not incidental to the thermal work — it is why the drum wall works. The faceted south-facing surfaces provide solar exposure; the Skylid louvers were developed to fit the skylight openings; the reflector/shade panels (Sunbender) were designed around the geometry. The later Cool Cell and Double Play systems migrated to conventional roof forms, but the underlying logic — building envelope as thermal collector/radiator — is continuous with what the zome enabled.
Named in the Zome Primer preface: Jim Welty and Robert Ford (Robert Ford residence framework); Berry Hickman (Zomeworks, rectangular trusses and plastic ball joint); Otto Jung, Design Industries (6-zone aluminum joint); Ken Leonard (layout); Holly Baer (editorial assistance).
The Zome Primer is 36 pages (Zomeworks Corp., Albuquerque, 1970). Confirmed page count from the LBL Appropriate Energy Technology Library Bibliography (Hannah R. Clark, August 1979, LBL-9391), which placed the Primer in the DOE-funded AET library as a key "design" reference — alongside Buckminster Fuller's The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller.