Zomeworks Corporation

Zomeworks Corporation is Steve Baer’s passive solar engineering and manufacturing company, founded in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the late 1960s. It is the institutional home for every product and patent in the archive.

Address (2002–2004): 1011 Sawmill Rd NW, PO Box 25805, Albuquerque NM 87125 USA Phone: 505 242-5354 · Fax: 505 243-5187 Web: www.zomeworks.com · Email: [email protected]

Current status (2026): Zomeworks as it existed under the Baers no longer exists. Following Steve Baer’s death in May 2024 and Holly Baer’s subsequent death, the company passed to a new owner who has not yet done anything visible with it (working facts from a private family communication since redacted; treated as unsourced). The institutional knowledge, staff relationships, and product lines of the Baer era are not confirmed to continue — though the zomeworks.com R&D pages remained online as of July 2026, describing the Double Play structures and the cargo-container test.

Name

“Zomeworks” fuses zome (zone-dome polyhedra) and “works.” The Dome Cookbook (1968) records the origin: Baer and Durkee coined “zome” in conversation — they agreed the structures weren’t domes because stretching zones makes them asymmetrical. The company’s own 2002 Cool Cell brochure glosses the name differently, as “a combination of ‘zonohedron’, a technical term from geometry, and ‘dome/home’” — a corporate simplification of the Durkee coinage. The co-founders Berry Hickman and Ed Heinz both appear in the Dome Cookbook as active collaborators before Zomeworks was founded: Hickman building domes at Manera Nueva (discovered that covering one dome stiffens neighbors); Heinz “working on new designs at Drop City.”

Corporate structure

By 2002 two related entities appear in documents: Zomeworks Mfg., Inc. and Cool Cell, Inc. — suggesting the thermal product line was organized as a separate corporate vehicle. The 2004 shareholders letter is signed by Baer as “President, Zomeworks Corporation.”

Internal telephone extensions: Baer (architectural Cool Cell division, ext 227); Jesse Rodefer (architectural Cool Cell division, ext 232).

Outside partners named in the Cool Cell Q&A (c. 2002): Bill Mingenbach of Architects Taos; Dick Bourne of Integrated Comfort, Davis, California (increasing cooling capacity in hot/humid climates); and Nanopore Incorporated of Albuquerque (ultra-thin super insulation).

Products and patents

Product	Description	Patent
Zome structures	Zone-dome polyhedra; 31-zone structural system	US Patent 3,722,153 (filed 1970, issued 1973)
Track Rack™ / Fixed Racks	Passive solar-panel tracker — “the undisputed cadillac of the tracker industry” per the 2002 brochure; tracks the sun with no power	Tracker patent series (1981–1989)
DrumWall	Water-filled drums behind south glazing for thermal mass	—
Skylid®	Freon-actuated insulated louvers, no electricity	US 3,884,414 (1975)
Sunbender®	Mirrored reflector/shade panels; solar tracker; summer/winter louver control	US 4,275,712 (1981), US 4,476,854 (1984), US 4,505,255 (1985)
Solar collector thermal control	Expansion tank overheating protection for solar collectors	US 4,528,976 (1985)
Solar panel support	Lightweight tracking mount frame	US 4,832,001 (1989)
Freeze-tolerant collector tube	Stretchable tube in rigid channel; expands with ice	US 5,143,053 (1992)
Passive battery cabinets	Night-sky-cooled enclosures for telephone company equipment	US 4,913,985 (1990), US 5,070,933 (1991), US 5,316,872 (1994)
Battery hydrogen venting	Passive H₂ venting using gas buoyancy	US 5,603,656 (1997, co-invented with D.C. Harrison), US 5,660,587 (1997)
Cool Cell™	Passive architectural climate-control: water ceiling + roof radiators	US 5,513,696 (1995), US 6,357,512 B1 (2002)
Double Play™ / Skymats™	Dual-function thermosiphon heating and cooling	US 6,357,512 B1 (2002)
Roll-formed aluminum roof	Snap-in copper pipe water channels; planned product line	—

The battery cabinet line — thousands of units sold to telephone companies — was a significant commercial product based on the same night-sky radiative cooling principle as Cool Cell, predating the architectural version.

Staff named in the archive

Name	Role
Steve Baer	Founder, President
David Harrison	VP; 12+ years with Cool Cell technology; believed in strong local Albuquerque market
Jesse Rodefer	Architectural Cool Cell division; spokesman to press
Tim James	Installer (Bruce Davis studio, 2004); later seeking spec house
Bill Mingenbach	Suggested 8” PVC ceiling pipes (1999); key Cool Cell development step
Joe Minella	Named boogie valves (plastic ball check valves in di-thermal wall prototypes)
Shawn Buckley	Di-thermal wall with boogie valves concept
Bristol Stickney	Heated-vs-unheated plates experiments; Utah job discussions (2004, with Mark Chalom)
Berry Hickman	Rectangular trusses; plastic ball joint for zome models
Day Chahroudi	Physicist/inventor; Cloud Gel, Low-E coatings; mentioned as potential contributor to 1973 Tribal Messenger
BRT	Drew aluminum rolled-formed roof drawing (01-22-03)
Kent Johnson	Double Play refinement and testing team (2004 shareholders letter)
Aaron Shiver	UNM mechanical engineering student; set up and ran the di-thermal wall experiments
George Sousea	Welded the 6-string Cool Cell lids used in the di-thermal experiments
Michael Zeiler	Discovered the hammered-ball-bearing valve-seat technique for boogie valves
David Boyd, Dick Henry	Brought the Skylid “to present state” with Baer (Sunspots, 1975)

Buildings and projects

Project	Location	Year	System
Baer House	Corrales, NM	1971	Zome cluster, DrumWall, Skylid, Sunbender
Monte Vista School	Albuquerque	1973	Greenhouse (Dave Harrison / Zomeworks)
Benedictine Monastery	Pecos, NM	1978	Drum wall, clerestory
Andy Shack	Albuquerque yard	1988–	Test building; unglazed Skymats, shutters
Bruce Davis Studio	Albuquerque	2004	Double Play Skymats cooling
Dave House North	Albuquerque	2008–09	Double Play system
Double Play test outbuildings (×2)	Zomeworks HQ, Albuquerque	by 2026	Double Play demos; one for sale, one used for meetings/tours
Container prototype	Albuquerque	2026	20’×8’ cargo container; roof water bladders; low-cost Double Play testbed

The Andy Shack is Zomeworks’ long-running test building on the Albuquerque property, used for experiments since 1988. Temperature measurements from 2000 and 2002 appear in the archive as primary data for the cooling system performance.

Peradam gathering (fall 1969)

In fall 1969 — the same year Zomeworks was co-founded — Dave Evans of Engelbart’s ARC group staged a three-day event called Peradam in the woods near Santa Barbara, bringing together technologists and members of what Fred Turner calls the “New Communalist” movement. Turner lists Zomeworks among the participants: “research institutes such as SRI and the Ecology Center and countercultural organizations such as Zomeworks (builders of domes), Portola, and the Hog Farm commune.”

This places Zomeworks in direct contact with Stanford Research Institute in its founding year, and connects Baer to the network around Engelbart’s human-computer interaction research and Stewart Brand‘s Whole Earth Catalog.

Source: Fred Turner, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” Ch. 4 (U Chicago Press, 2006)

Relationship with government

Consistently adversarial. NSF grant success: “0 — actually less than 0 figuring the time wasted writing proposals” (Sunspots, 1975). The company relied on private capital — the September 2004 shareholders letter sought $93,000 from investors, holding the stock price at $3.00/share for the next 30,000 shares, chiefly to fund a $26,000 roll-form machine (lease-purchase, $650/month over five years) plus four months of R&D salaries and $50,000 in prototype subsidies. Six prospects (labeled A–F) were listed at the time, including Army buildings in Iraq, Alfred von Bachmayr’s border and Navajo Reservation projects (with doctors John and Lucy Fogarty of Crownpoint and the McCune Foundation), and a Utah job with Mark Chalom and Bristol Stickney.

Senator Domenici was contacted for help connecting Zomeworks to Army building contracts in Iraq (2004). The 2006 NSRC state field study independently validated the thermal claims, but funding ran through the state, not Zomeworks. On the other side of the ledger, the 2004 letter cites a theoretical report by Jay Burch, Craig Christiansen, and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimating the financial advantage of Double Play systems.

Business model and vision

Baer’s stated vision in the 2004 shareholders letter: trained teams with roll-formers, stocks of coiled aluminum, and inventories of headers, pumps and parts, operating in “Amarillo, Denver, Salt Lake City, Tucson, San Diego and Riverside counties in California” — “perhaps the businesses will be franchises.” The architecture was meant to be simple enough to travel: “Every part is simple, every connection easy. No anti-freeze, no heat exchangers, no glass.”

The same letter is candid about the market problem: the Davis retrofit “has not yet produced more work”; water tanks in the living room “are not to everyone’s taste. Many will never accept water tanks in any configuration in their living room, but some people will” — garages, studios, workshops, warehouses and some commercial buildings were the near-term candidates, with roll-formed metal roofs plumbed to radiant floors as the design that “will look like any other building.” The Cool Cell Q&A concedes one hard downside — the water adds 25 pounds per square foot of structural load — and anticipated full production “within 12 months” (a timetable the record does not show being met).

Cool Cell’s deployment strategy as of 2002: piggyback on existing pool solar infrastructure (“harvesting a second crop off his solar pool heater”), then move to purpose-built systems. Services offered: design consulting (with license), materials supply, on-site installation support, and ongoing service.

Publications

Books and papers by Baer published under Zomeworks:

Dome Cookbook (Lama Foundation, 1968) — pre-Zomeworks, listed as “out of print” by 1975
Zome Primer: Elements of Zonohedra Geometry (Zomeworks Corporation, 1970)
Sunspots: Collected Facts and Solar Fiction (Zomeworks Corporation, June 1975)
“Gravity Engines and the Diving Engine,” Coevolution Quarterly, Summer 1974