Holly Baer

Steve Baer’s wife and collaborator. Died February 23, 2026, after battling Alzheimer’s disease. This was reported in a private family communication relayed to this KB in July 2026; the message itself has since been redacted from this archive as private, so the claim currently stands without a retained source and is not independently web-verified. If a public obituary or death record surfaces, it should be ingested as the primary source for this claim.

This KB’s own history on this question, in full, for transparency: an earlier pass claimed she “died 2025” based on an over-read of an unrelated Wikipedia sentence about Zomeworks’ ownership passing to Benjamin Rodefer. A 2026-07-19 audit and research pass found no obituary anywhere and, reasonably given the evidence available at the time, corrected this to “very likely still alive” — citing a Wikipedia passage (edited 2026-07-06 by an account named “JoseBaer”) that described her in present tense as still serving as Zomeworks’ Director of Administration. That correction is now itself superseded by the privately relayed report above, which gives an actual death date (February 23, 2026) roughly a year and a half after Steve’s own death and about 4.5 months before the July 6 Wikipedia edit. The most likely reconciliation: the July 6 edit was narrowly focused on fixing “confusion over ownership and governance history” (per its own edit summary, about the Rodefer point) and simply didn’t revisit the adjacent, by-then-outdated sentence about Holly — a common way stale text survives nearby edits. This reconciliation is plausible, not independently confirmed.

Note (2026-08-10): A data-lead.com business profile for David Nevin at Zomeworks, retrieved 2026-08-10, still lists “Holly Baer (Director of Administration)” among current colleagues. This is consistent with the stale-data reconciliation above — business directory listings are notoriously slow to update after personnel changes. It does not constitute independent evidence that she is alive; the private family communication remains the most specific source on this question.

In December 1964, in the attic of her grandmother’s house in Zurich, Switzerland, Holly made a rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron on the floor — the first physical zonohedra model, predating the Drop City work by nearly four years. This is the archive’s earliest documented date.

Named in the Zome Primer (1970) preface for editorial assistance, and listed on the Dome Cookbook’s title page as secretary of the cookbook fund (Box 422, Corrales NM). The Baers’ Zurich chapter ran through her family: the Dome Cookbook places the first model in the attic of her grandmother’s house, during the years Steve was studying mathematics at ETH Zurich after his US Army service in Germany.

A Mother Earth News interview quoted in this archive’s Hickman/Heinz research records Holly as a co-organizer, with Steve and Barry Hickman, of the spring 1969 Alloy Conference — the gathering that directly preceded Zomeworks’ founding: “in the spring of ‘69, Barry Hickman and Holly and I organized the Alloy Conference.”

Holly Baer

See also