Solar Fools / Lemon Wiki: Progress Update, Spring 2026

There is a type of project that starts as a narrow question and keeps opening up. That is the best description I have for what the Lemon Wiki has become.

The short version, for anyone I have mentioned this to in passing: Steve Baer was an engineer and inventor who founded Zomeworks in Albuquerque in 1969 and spent the next thirty-plus years building and documenting passive solar and thermal systems — water-based cooling, night-sky radiation, the Beadwall, the Skylid, a dozen patents, hundreds of pages of essays and brochures. He died in May 2024. He left behind an archive that had never been properly indexed, and a house in Corrales, New Mexico that may be the most significant unregistered piece of passive solar architecture in the American Southwest.

The Lemon Wiki is my attempt to build a structured, navigable knowledge base out of that archive — ingesting primary sources one at a time and distilling them into linked pages. It is curated with the help of a large language model, which is where the "Lemon" comes from (a riff on "LLM"). The workflow is simple: register the source, extract what is new or surprising, update the relevant pages, and log the operation. Nothing gets rewritten after the fact. The archive grows by accretion.

Holly Baer

A brief note first. Holly Baer, Steve's wife and collaborator, died February 23, 2026, after battling Alzheimer's disease — reported in a private family communication since redacted from this archive. [This entry originally reported her as "reportedly also deceased (2025)," which a 2026-07-19 research pass found no support for and corrected to "very likely still living" — that correction was itself superseded hours later by Jose's message giving an actual date. See wiki/people/holly-baer.md for the full history. Corrected 2026-07-19.] The archive's earliest documented date belongs to her: in December 1964, in the attic of her grandmother's house in Zurich, she made a rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron on the floor — the first physical zonohedra model, nearly four years before the Drop City structures that most people associate with the beginning of Baer's geometric work. She is noted in the Zome Primer preface for editorial assistance. Steve enrolled at ETH Zurich partly because he had married Holly while stationed in Germany with the US Army. The Zurich chapter — which is where the geometry began — happened because of her.

What has been built this year

The wiki has been growing steadily across thermal systems, solar collection, history and culture, and reference material. Almost all of it was built in 2026. [The original figure given here, 252 pages, does not hold up against this archive's own operation log and was removed in a 2026-07-19 audit; the wiki's actual size as of this writing is far smaller and grew from there.]

Some of the things I am most pleased about finding:

The archive's earliest known Baer quote in a major publication turned out to be in a December 1972 Rolling Stone piece by Stewart Brand — a profile of Xerox PARC and the emerging counterculture-computing network. Brand identifies Baer as "dome and solar designer Steve Baer from dusty Albuquerque." The quote itself is vintage Baer. The piece also placed Zomeworks inside a specific social network — alongside Engelbart, the Whole Earth Catalog, Portola Institute — that is not obvious from the passive solar literature.

Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture (University of Chicago, 2006) turned out to contain a chapter that documents this same network in detail: Doug Engelbart and Bill English traveling to New Mexico to meet Baer, Zomeworks at the 1969 Peradam gathering alongside SRI, the Hog Farm, and Portola. The passive solar archive and the origin story of personal computing overlap more than I expected.

The Mother Earth News piece from July 1973 — the earliest long-form journalism about Baer and the Baer House in the archive — contained Holly Baer's clearest documented voice: asked about summer cooling, she said "water sops up the difference." The construction figures came from the same piece: the house was built between May 1971 and August 1972, at twenty dollars per square foot, with ninety fifty-five-gallon drums behind the south wall.

On the technical side, the full Zomeworks patent portfolio is now catalogued — fifteen patents from 1973 through 2002, from the zonohedra geometry patent through the Cool Cell. Two previously uncatalogued Baer essay titles surfaced in a French low-tech anthology: "Basic Technologies" and "The Paradox of the Clothesline."

The preservation brief

Separate from the wiki, I wrote a standalone preservation brief for the Baer House — a document intended for Bruce Davis to circulate to preservation organizations, institutions, and private buyers. It covers the seven-year development arc before the house was built, the full patent lineage, and the current estate situation. It is available as a PDF. If you know anyone who works in architectural preservation, historic property acquisition, or institutional collections in the Southwest, I am happy to pass it along.

What this feels like from the inside

I was not a passive solar person when I started this. I was a person who found an archive and wanted to know what was in it. The Lemon Wiki is what that process looks like when you do it slowly and carefully enough to actually learn something.

What keeps it interesting is that the archive rewards close reading. Almost every source has turned out to contain something I did not expect — a date that changes a timeline, a connection to a figure I thought was unrelated, a quote that is better than anything summarized about it. The Drop City documentary transcript placed specific names on speakers who had been anonymous for fifty years. The Fine Homebuilding forum post from 2006 gave maintenance data on a 1983 Beadwall installation — ten years, two hundred dollars, one motor rebuild — that no engineering document would have preserved.

The archive runs from December 1964 through a 2025 academic paper in the ICON journal that establishes the Baer House as the physical origin of a broadly overlooked chapter of American engineering history. That is a sixty-year span. I expect it to keep opening up.

If you have questions about the project, the preservation brief, or the archive, reach out directly.