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97 articles, most recently updated first
Sculptor and philanthropist (1890–1984). Heir to a Kidder, Peabody & Company founder. Funded three experimental houses by Eleanor Raymond on her Dover, Massachusetts estate, includ…
Physicist, chemist, and inventor (living, Tijeras NM). Worked at Zomeworks with Steve Baer in the early 1970s; taught at MIT; co-invented the first Low-E coating for glass; invente…
Geometric abstractionist painter (b. 1933) who co-founded Park Place Gallery in New York and the Libre commune in Colorado, building a 40-foot geodesic dome studio. Often misidenti…
Mechanical engineer (1912–2007) who joined Frank Bridgers in September 1951 to form Bridgers & Paxton. Co-engineer of the 1956 Albuquerque Solar Building, the world's first commerc…
Pioneering American architect (1887-1989) whose 60+ year career included experimental material houses and the 1948 Dover Sun House, the first solar-heated residence. FAIA 1961.
Mechanical engineer (1922–2005) who founded the first independent mechanical consulting engineering firm in New Mexico (May 1951) and co-engineered the world's first commercial sol…
MIT chemical engineer (1903-1998) who chaired MIT Solar Energy Research for 26 years, built MIT Solar Houses I-IV, developed the Hottel-Whillier flat-plate collector model, and cla…
Nuclear physicist turned passive solar pioneer (1935-2023) who directed the LANL Solar Energy Group, led authorship of the DOE Passive Solar Design Handbook, and brought scientific…
Mechanical engineer (1908-1986) who co-founded the Association for Applied Solar Energy (predecessor to ASES), developed ASHRAE's Solar Heat Gain Factor method, and provided the si…
Author of The Owner-Built Home (1972) and other self-construction guides (1927-1986) who shared Baer's DIY ethos and died when an experimental earth-sheltered dome collapsed.
Hungarian-American biophysicist and solar energy pioneer (1900-1995) who developed the Dover Sun House's Glauber's salt heat storage system, a WWII portable solar desalinator, and …
American artist (b. 1975) whose ZOME ALLOY full-scale reproduction of the Baer house and ongoing Water School project place Steve Baer's work at the center of contemporary art disc…
Dutch-born ecological architect (1935–2024). State Architect of California under Jerry Brown (1975–78), founder of Farallones Institute, designer of the Gregory Bateson Building (n…
Assistant Professor of Architecture at IE University, Segovia, author of the 2025 ICON paper 'Steve Baer and the Double-Play Thermosiphon', the archive's most-cited academic source…
Atlantic writer who quoted Baer's 'The Sun Riots' fiction in full during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests — the first known appearance of Baer's solar fiction in major national…
Architect working with Zomeworks on border and Navajo Reservation building prospects for Double Play systems, per the 2004 shareholders letter.
Author of Soft Energy Paths: Toward a Durable Peace, which complements Baer's philosophy of appropriate, sustainable technology.
Poet who met Peter Rabbit at Libre, married him, and co-founded the Taos Poetry Circus with him (1982-2003).
Co-founder of Zomeworks with Baer and Ed Heinz in 1969; built domes at Manera Nueva and contributed rectangular trusses and a plastic ball joint to the zome system.
Named by Wikipedia (uncited) as current sole owner of Zomeworks Corporation after Baer's 2024 death; Corrales-raised, Cornell-educated former New Mexico state representative and te…
SRI Augmentation Research Center figure who accompanied Doug Engelbart to the Libre commune to meet Steve Baer.
Suggested overhead 8-inch PVC ceiling water tanks to Steve Baer — a key Cool Cell development step — and is credited with insulated drum shades at the NM State Office Building in T…
New Mexico governor whose Water Innovation Fund financed the 2006 night-sky radiant cooling potentials report.
Researcher who in 1961 demonstrated nocturnal radiation cooling at an Arizona house using a 280 ft2 black cloth radiator and 10-ton rock storage, presented at the UN Conference on …
Photographer credited for the March 1973 'Solar Energy' insert photographs of New Mexico passive solar installations in the Tribal Messenger.
Co-author with Lloyd Kahn of Shelter (1973), the global vernacular building classic sometimes called Domebook 3.
Co-author of the 2006 NSRC New Mexico report and Zomeworks collaborator who ran the heated-vs-unheated plates experiments and repeated night-cooling experiments in Utah.
Co-author with Michael Riordan of The Solar Home Book (1976), which contextualizes Baer within the broader passive solar movement.
Albuquerque architect and Solar Fools member who worked directly with Steve Baer, installed a Double Play at his own studio, and argues from 40+ years of practice that passive syst…
American architect and systems theorist (1895-1983), inventor of the geodesic dome, who awarded Drop City a $500 Dymaxion Award and serves as the structural and intellectual foil t…
Co-editor of Activism in Architecture: Bright Dreams of Passive Energy Design (Routledge, 2018).
Primary organizer and contact of Solar Fools, working to bring Steve Baer's passive heating and cooling designs into production.
Painter, pattern theorist, and educator (1941-2021) who co-founded Drop City in 1965 and introduced Buckminster Fuller's structural ideas into the commune's building practice.
Author of The Solar House: Passive Heating and Cooling, providing updated passive solar techniques building on pioneers like Baer.
Inventor associated with Zomeworks-lineage patents including the 1975 Beadwall patent, the 1997 Integral Roof Cooling Container (US 5,609,200), and a co-invented passive ventilatio…
Author of a water-wall solar design history who documented Timothy Maloney's One Design modules and credited Polly Cooper as likely having designed more water-wall homes than anyon…
One of the developers, with Dick Henry and Baer, who brought the Skylid to its documented state.
Listed as Vice President at Zomeworks Corporation per Wikipedia and LinkedIn/ZoomInfo; the thinnest-documented of the company's current leadership figures.
Californian architect, described as one of the country's leading passive solar architects, who designed the Karen Terry House (1974) as a variation of his own Santa Fe house, the S…
One of the developers, with David Boyd and Baer, who brought the Skylid to its documented state.
Director of SRI's Augmentation Research Center who traveled with Bill English to New Mexico's Libre commune specifically to meet Steve Baer.
Author of How Buildings Work (Oxford, 1995), quoted in Baer's di-thermal roof materials on why ceiling radiant panels feel better than floor systems.
Co-founder of Zomeworks Corporation with Steve Baer and Barry Hickman (c.1969-70), recorded in the Dome Cookbook as working on new zome designs at Drop City.
Author of The Passive Solar Energy Book (1979), a practical passive solar reference held in the Joule Heist collection.
Illustrator who drew the artwork for Baer's April 1973 Tribal Messenger solar energy chapter.
Yale solar scientist whose 1964 book Direct Use of the Sun's Energy documented nocturnal radiation cooling of 10-35 BTU/ft2/hr decades before Baer's experiments confirmed comparabl…
Author of From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006), which documents Zomeworks' place in the counterculture-computing network and calls Baer the Whole Earth Catalog's foremost aut…
Co-founder of Drop City in 1965 with Clark Richert, JoAnn Bernofsky, and Richard Kallweit.
Co-author with Henri Picciotto of Zome Geometry, which expands on the mathematical principles behind Baer's structural designs.
Author of the August 1979 LBL Appropriate Energy Technology Library Bibliography (LBL-9391) that included Sunspots and Zome Primer.
Inventor of the Skytherm roof-pond passive heating and cooling system, whose influence on Zomeworks is documented in Baer's own chapter of Activism in Architecture and whose 1973 A…
Solar-house builder (three houses at $1-2/sq ft) sidelined at the 1973 Washington DC NSF solar meeting while Alcoa and Texas Instruments sat at the table; cited by Baer as an ignor…
Co-author with George W. Hart of Zome Geometry, on the mathematics of Baer's zonohedra-based designs.
Steve Baer's wife, who made the first rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron model in Zurich in December 1964 (the origin of the zonohedra research) and assisted editorially on the Zome Primer…
Zomeworks spokesman quoted in the 2000 Albuquerque Journal Cool Cell article and credited with suggesting existing swimming-pool solar heaters be repurposed as night-time building …
Director of the circa-2002 Drop City documentary that features Steve Baer on camera.
Co-founder of Drop City in 1965 with Clark Richert, Gene Bernofsky, and Richard Kallweit.
Zomeworks staffer who named the 'boogie valves' — the floating plastic check valves used in the di-thermal wall prototypes.
Co-author with Ken Butti of A Golden Thread (1980), the mainstream institutional history of solar energy.
Albuquerque Journal staff writer who authored the August 21, 2000 article 'Cool pipes chill room naturally' about Zomeworks' Cool Cell.
Son of Steve and Holly Baer, executor of Steve Baer's estate, Solar Fools member, and point of contact for Baer House preservation questions.
Santa Fe builder and contractor who commissioned and largely hand-built her landmark 1974 passive solar house and co-designed the Sol-Mod house with Bruce W. Davis.
Co-author, with Mark Chalom and Bristol Stickney, of the 2006 New Mexico night-sky radiant cooling potentials report.
New Mexico passive solar designer; principal founder (1972) and first executive director of NMSEA, co-founded with Peter van Dresser and Steve Baer at Ghost Ranch; Sun-dwellings de…
Co-author with John Perlin of A Golden Thread (1980), the canonical solar history that omits Baer, Hay, and Thomason.
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo architecture professor (1967-1988) and passive solar architect; HUD-funded Atascadero Skytherm roof-pond researcher with Harold Hay; partner of Polly Coope…
Co-inventor with Baer of two late Zomeworks patent applications (solar thermal tube plate heat exchanger, 2007; dual-axis high-wind solar panel support, 2010), neither granted.
Author of the Domebook series and Shelter who credited Baer's Dome Cookbook as 'the first flash of insight' and as a direct influence on the Whole Earth Catalog.
Co-editor of Activism in Architecture: Bright Dreams of Passive Energy Design (Routledge, 2018), which contains Baer's chapter on Harold Hay's influence.
Architect who co-authored the 2006 New Mexico night-sky radiant cooling report with Bristol Stickney and worked with Stickney on a Utah project repeating Baer's night-cooling exper…
Architect whose 'sitting in shorts during a polar vortex' story is the model example of Passive House comfort-framed messaging.
Co-author with Bruce Anderson of The Solar Home Book (Cheshire Books, 1976).
Director at Zomeworks Corporation per Wikipedia and LinkedIn, with prior roles at Elliston Development Inc., Carrizo Solar Corp., and Grant Thornton LLP; possibly the same Mike Ell…
Michael E. Reynolds (b. 1945), architect and founder of Earthship Biotecture in Taos, New Mexico, developer of the Earthship recycled-tire building type and drafter of New Mexico's…
Villanova University-affiliated solar-DIY Usenet correspondent whose July 1995 post transcribed and preserved passages of Baer's Sunspots air-loop rock-storage chapter from the 197…
Co-author of Design for a Limited Planet, which features Baer's early work alongside other ecological designers.
Of Design Industries, Albuquerque; made the 6-zone aluminum joint used in Baer's zome hardware.
Founder and CEO of Zometool Inc., a 45-year developer of Baer's 31-zone zonohedra geometry, and a founding member of Solar Fools.
Proposer of the orbital solar-power satellite (funded by a $200,000 AD Little grant) that Baer critiqued in his 1973 Tribal Messenger chapter.
Commune name of Peter Douthit (1936-2012): Drop City member 1966-1968, co-founder of the Libre commune, author of the memoir Drop City (1971), and later co-founder of the Taos Poet…
New Mexico pioneer who built some of the first passive solar houses in the state in the 1950s, co-founded NMSEA with Baer and Haggard in 1972, and wrote A Landscape for Humans, Hom…
Architect who co-founded a firm (later the San Luis Sustainability Group) with Ken Haggard in 1976 and, with him, likely designed more water wall homes than anyone else in the worl…
Spiritual teacher (Richard Alpert) who stayed at the Lama Foundation in 1970, where the community produced the manuscript that became Be Here Now.
Co-founder of Drop City in 1965 alongside Clark Richert and the Bernofskys.
Collaborator who ran the February 1974 reflector tests with Baer showing skylight reflectors increase heat gain by more than 30%.
Passive solar experimenter whose same-level collector/tank thermosiphon with an oil-on-water fluidic check valve directly fed into Zomeworks' di-thermal wall development; named by …
Inventor, author, and Zomeworks co-founder (died May 2024) whose passive solar work — Dome Cookbook, Sunspots, the Baer House, DrumWall, Skylid, Cool Cell, and the double-play ther…
Counterculture artist, USCO and Lama Foundation founding member who co-coined the word 'zome' with Steve Baer; later took the name Nooruddeen Durkee.
Founder of the Whole Earth Catalog (fall 1968) and central broker between the commune movement and Bay Area computer research; quoted Baer in the 1972 Rolling Stone 'Spacewar' arti…
Zomeworks employee who plumbed the Double Play thermosiphon storage array at Bruce W. Davis's Albuquerque studio in 2004 and later sought property for a Zomeworks spec house.
Inventor and founder of One Design Inc who developed rotationally-molded water-wall modules for passive heating and cooling from 1974; named by Baer as a Cool Cell predecessor.
Karen Terry's single hired helper during the nine-month self-build of the Karen Terry House.
Harvard physicist who independently tracked passive solar developments for decades and wrote Super Solar Houses (1983).
New Mexico passive solar adobe architect, called the 'grandfather of solar' in his region, who referred Karen Terry to David Wright.
Japanese engineer who in 1958 proposed combining solar energy, nocturnal radiation cooling, radiant panels, and a heat pump into a complete year-round air-conditioning system — the…