Corrales

Corrales, New Mexico is the village where Steve Baer settled and worked for his entire adult career — the site of the Baer House zome cluster, the home base from which the Zomeworks thermal inventions were first demonstrated, and the community whose local paper, the Corrales Comment, both published Baer’s provocations in life and recorded his death. In this archive, Corrales is the geographic anchor of the passive-solar story.

Baer’s arrival and the house

Baer relocated to Albuquerque in 1965, working as a surveyor and welder, and moved to Corrales in 1968, where he began his experiments with dome structures. Corrales remained his base for the rest of his working life.

The Baer House — built in Corrales over May 1971 to August 1972 — is the village’s central artifact in the archive: a cluster of eleven zomes of roughly 1,900 square feet (adobe brick walls clad in aluminum), the first full-scale testbed for the DrumWall, the Skylid insulated louvers, and the Sunbender reflector/shade panels. SAH Archipedia calls it “one of the most innovative experiments in the use of passive solar energy to heat and cool a modern dwelling” and places the Corrales house at the midpoint of New Mexico’s passive-solar lineage — after the 1950s Bridgers & Paxton Solar Building in Albuquerque, immediately before the Earthships Mike Reynolds began developing in Taos. David Bainbridge’s 1981 water-wall manual frames the Corrales house as the catalyzing event for the broader wave of 1970s–80s water-wall practitioners, and TU Delft published a formal case study of the “Corrales Zome House” in its DASH journal (2018).

A former neighbor’s recollection in the 2024 obituary captures the house’s local reputation: “When you walked into his house in the middle of summer, when it was 100 degrees outside, it was comfortable inside.”

A 1970s passive-solar center

Baer’s own 2009 survey for AIA Albuquerque opens with the village: “Thirty years ago there was strong interest in passive solar in Corrales and all of New Mexico. Many houses were built with lots of south facing glass admitting sun directly into the house or onto concrete or adobe ‘Trombe’ walls or drum walls.”

Corrales projects in that survey:

Project	System	Year
Baer Zome / Drum Wall	DrumWall behind south glazing	1971
Paul Davis House (Paul Davis & Steve Baer)	Air-loop rock storage	1972
Baer Zome Cluster	Zome cluster	1972

The same survey records the wave receding. By 2009 Baer was struck, “driving through Corrales today,” by “how many shades are drawn during cold winter to block the sun that might enter south facing windows” — the village that once led the passive-solar epidemic no longer operating its own buildings correctly.

The Corrales Comment

The village’s newspaper is a recurring primary source in the archive:

July 8, 2000 — Baer’s column “To irrigate we should pump our rivers over again, not pump them dry,” proposing to pump rivers from their mouths back to arid regions rather than conserve by doing without. A same-date note to Bruce W. Davis records the local reception: “Not a peep from anyone in response. I suppose most regard it as offensive.” Baer’s companion essays of mid-2000 — “Sunny Days Ahead!” and “CO₂ and Global Warming” — were likewise written from his Corrales address.
June 14, 2024 — the obituary “Visionary Corrales architect and inventor dies at 85,” recording Baer’s death on May 17, 2024. It is a key biographical source, though imperfect: it names a surviving “son Steve” where the Amherst memorial (co-written by the son himself) confirms the name is Jose Baer.

People of Corrales

The Baer family — Steve, Holly Baer, and their children including Jose Baer — made Corrales home from 1968 on. Benjamin Rodefer, named by Wikipedia (uncited there) as the current sole owner of Zomeworks, also grew up in Corrales — the same town as the Baer family — attending Sandoval Elementary before Cibola High School and Cornell.

The estate and preservation question

With Steve Baer’s death in May 2024 and Holly Baer’s in February 2026, the Corrales house passed to the estate, with Jose Baer as executor. The Baer House preservation guide treats the village itself as an actor in the preservation case: the Village of Corrales has a historic preservation ordinance, and a Village landmark designation would provide some protection without acquisition; Corrales is also 15 miles from the University of New Mexico campus, the guide’s strongest candidate steward for the house as a living passive-solar laboratory.