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concepts · updated 2026-05-12

Sunmen

confidence: medium volatility: cold verified: 2026-07-19fresh

A manifesto by Steve Baer (May 2004) imagining a practice called "sun work" and the people who do it — Sunmen. Part vision statement, part polemic, it is the archive's clearest articulation of what Ba

A manifesto by Steve Baer (May 2004) imagining a practice called “sun work” and the people who do it — Sunmen. Part vision statement, part polemic, it is the archive’s clearest articulation of what Baer thinks solar energy work should be.

What Sunmen do

A Sunman works outdoors “in the sun and under the night sky among cars and buildings, beside bushes, trees, streams, rocks, and pavement with their IR scanners.” He needs few desks, chairs, schedules, or computers. His education begins with picking up an infrared scanner — “this tool, which measures the temperature of a surface instantly by merely pointing at it, leaves a stream of questions for its user that becomes a Sunman’s education.”

Sunmen study the animate and inanimate together: “animals, their energy budgets and their forms; allometry, the study of scale. Trees, shrubs, grasses and their relationship to climate.” The goal is “better architecture, better means of heating and cooling, better city planning, improved ways of getting around (back to your feet and your bikes).”

Sun work “is not a joke, not theater where students express themselves as trees, clouds or rabbits, it is a science that uses mathematics and measures things with rules, tapes, clocks and thermometers.”

What Sunmen reject

Baer devotes the second half to what Sunmen oppose:

  • Subsidies and tax credits. “Sunmen don’t want subsidies, solar tax credits, green energy laws or other such influences on their work. One can no more subsidize the sun than heat it up.” (See also Tax, shine, and sunshine.)
  • False celebrations. “Sunmen are embarrassed to participate in contrived events such as Earth Day and Sun Day. False celebrations ease the way to false economics.”
  • Point systems. “They have devised special point systems to flatter themselves” — a reference to green building certification.
  • Tax credit engineers. “A Sunman regards a tax credit engineer, who needs no forklifts, hammers, shovels or cement truck, as no better than white collar cannibals.”

What Sunmen love

Sunmen love energy and wealth, without which they couldn’t work. Most of all, they love clarity, truth and nature.

A Sunman loves his tools; his saws, his drill, his tin snips, pipe wrench, crescent wrench, propane torch, silicone sealant, pipe clamp. To even think, he must return to them.

Sunmen love the feel of copper and aluminum; they love to weld, to bend metal, to tighten bolts. They love the sensations of thermal mass, of bottles and tanks of water, of stones and cobbles, bricks, slab floors and masonry walls.

A Sunman loves convection, as alive as a heart beating.

Why it matters for the archive

Sunmen is the meta-document for the entire collection. It explains why the archive cares about IR measurement, physical tools, and night-sky observation rather than software models. It explains the hostility to subsidies that runs through Tax, shine, and sunshine. And it explains why the archive’s engineering notes always mix practical detail with aesthetic judgment — for Baer, sun work is inseparable from “the ugly and the beautiful.”

See also