concepts · updated 2026-08-12
Dome Cookbook
confidence: high volatility: cold verified: 2026-08-12fresh
Steve Baer's first book (1968, Lama Foundation cookbook fund, $1.00) — zonohedra geometry, car-top dome construction how-to, Drop City journal entries, and the origin of the word 'zome.' Its funky typewritten-collage format directly influenced Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog.
Steve Baer‘s first book, published in 1968 by the Lama Foundation‘s “cookbook fund” (Corrales, NM; Holly Baer, secretary; price $1.00). A 44-page collage of typewritten geometry and construction text, handwritten journal entries and fiction, construction photographs, and hand-drawn diagrams — no table of contents, pages numbered in circled numerals. It went through at least three printings (the third in 1969, confirmed by the MCA Denver “West of Center” exhibition catalog).
Geometry and the origin of “zome”
The book introduces Baer’s geometric vocabulary — “zonagons” (his spelling; polygons where each side has a parallel partner), zonahedra (“a convex polyhedron all of whose faces are zonagons”), parallelohedra, and the “star” construction of n lines through a common point yielding n(n−1) faces. Baer credits the lineage from crystallographer E.S. Federov through P. Donchian to H.S.M. Coxeter’s Regular Polytopes, where he first read of zonohedra.
Page 24 carries the handwritten origin story of the word zome: talking with Steve Durkee, they agreed the structures “really were not domes because they are not symmetrical”; Durkee said “they are zones,” and the fused word kept Baer awake that night. The book also documents the origin timeline: Holly Baer’s rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron on a Zurich attic floor in December 1964, Baer’s zonohedra work in Albuquerque by spring 1965, and his first, “stunned” visit to Drop City in April 1966.
Construction how-to
The practical core is the car-top method used at Drop City and Manera Nueva: “Car tops are a good building material. They are cheap, strong, have an excellent paint job and are available almost everywhere.” The book opens with a manifesto on language and geometry (“we invented language, we can improve today’s terrifying man made world”) and frames the geometry as “instructions on how to almost break out of prison” — the prison being the rectilinear “cube” of industrial building.
Influence
Per Lloyd Kahn, the Dome Cookbook’s funky typewritten format directly influenced Stewart Brand‘s Whole Earth Catalog (fall 1968), which in turn seeded the Domebook series and Shelter. Stewart Brand reviewed it in the Catalog alongside Ken Kern’s The Owner-Built Home as manuals for self-determined shelter. The book contains Baer’s earliest mention of solar heating and the first documentation of collaborators Barry Hickman and Ed Heinz; the same cookbook fund also published Flow Shot 1 and Sol Shot 1, possibly Baer’s earliest solar publication.
See also
- Steve Baer — author
- Lama Foundation — publisher (cookbook fund)
- Zome — the word coined in this book
- Drop City — construction site documented in the book
- Whole Earth Catalog — format influenced by this book
- Steve Durkee — co-coiner of “zome”
- Ken Kern — The Owner-Built Home reviewed alongside it in the Whole Earth Catalog
- Sunspots — Baer’s later (1975) book