Steve Durkee

Counterculture artist, of USCO and the Lama Foundation (Turner 2006). Co-coined the word “zome” with Steve Baer. The Dome Cookbook itself was published by the “cookbook fund” at the Lama Foundation.

From the Dome Cookbook (p. 24): Baer and Durkee agreed the structures “really were not domes because they are not symmetrical. Stretching the zones of a zonahedra makes it asymmetrical. Durkee said ‘they are zones.’” Baer was “very excited by this word” — “The next day at work Durkee and I kept saying things like — ‘well almost time to go zome’” — and he came to see it as a protection against people calling the structures “geodesic domes and Fuller type domes.” (The Dome Cookbook names only “Durkee”; the identification with Steve Durkee is near-certain but inferred.)

Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2006) notes Durkee visiting Doug Engelbart’s ARC offices as Stewart Brand brought the commune movement and the computer researchers together — placing Durkee at the intersection of the counterculture and early computing networks that Turner’s book traces.

The Dome Cookbook ingest notes identify him as “later Brother William”; he subsequently took the name Nooruddeen Durkee following conversion to Islam (widely documented, though not in the archive’s cited sources).

See also

• Fred Turner
• Stewart Brand
• Zome
• Lama Foundation
• Drop City
• Steve Baer
• Peradam — 1969 gathering of SRI technologists and New Communalists, part of the same counterculture–computing nexus Turner places Durkee in
• Dome Cookbook — the Lama Foundation-published book that records the “zome” coinage with Durkee