Baer House — Hidden Architecture

Project data

Architect: Steve Baer
Location: Corrales, New Mexico, United States
Year: 1971
Building type: Individual housing
Floor area: 185 m² (~1,990 sq ft)
Status: Built

Description

In 1971, in Corrales, New Mexico, Steve Baer built an 11-room house with a total floor area of 185 m². The rooms were in the form of polygons — which he called “zomes” — joined to one another on one or two sides, giving the floor plan the look of a cluster.

The adobe brick walls were aluminum-clad on the outside. Four of the zomes had their entire south face taken up by one single-glazed window, with metal drums filled with water piled up inside, nearly blocking the opening.

In summer, the occupants could manually operate shutters to cover the windows during the day; heat was then dissipated at night through air circulation. In winter, the drums collected heat through maximum exposure to solar radiation; at night, the shutters were closed to prevent any heat loss to the outside.

Solar-powered vapor pressure mechanisms controlled orientable louvers beneath skylights, allowing natural modulation of interior illumination.

Photographs credited

EPFL Architecture Living Archives (interior and structural views)
Wikipedia / National Archives and Records Administration (aerial view)
SAH Archipedia (exterior documentation)

References cited

Borasi, Giovanna, and Mirko Zardini. Sorry, Out of Gas: Architecture’s Response to the 1973 Oil Crisis. Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2007.

Tags on source page

Do it yourself, environmentalism.

Notes

This page provides a compact, third-party architectural description of the Baer House with institutional photo credits. It confirms the 185 m² / 11-zome dimensions consistent with the SAH Archipedia entry (which gives ~1,900 sq ft). The Borasi & Zardini reference connects the Baer House to the CCA’s broader scholarship on architecture’s response to the 1973 oil crisis — a new bibliographic lead not previously in the archive.

The page is primarily a photo gallery with brief text. Most of its factual content is already captured in the wiki’s existing Baer House article and the SAH Archipedia source. Its main new contribution is the CCA citation and the EPFL Living Archives as a photo source.