Dome Cookbook — Steve Baer (1968, 2nd printing)

Source file: 1968-01-01-dome-cookbook-baer.pdf (44 pages, image scan)

Also published by the same fund: FLOW SHOT 1 (confirmed published, not in archive) and SOL SHOT 1 (confirmed published; poster in possession, pending ingest). If “Sol” = solar, Sol Shot 1 would be Baer’s earliest solar publication — predating the 1973 Tribal Messenger serialization by ~5 years and Sunspots (1975) by ~7 years.

Publication facts

1st printing: 1968 (Lama Foundation, Corrales NM)
2nd printing: this copy (undated; between 1st and 3rd)
3rd printing: 1969 (confirmed by MCA Denver “West of Center” exhibition catalog)
The scan shows the cover with two photographs: a top view of zome structures under construction at Drop City (mountains in background), and a construction worker on the zome frame

Structure

The book is not a single linear text — it is a collage:

Typewritten main text (geometry, construction)
Handwritten journal entries, fiction, and commentary in the right margins and on separate pages
Construction photographs
Geometry diagrams (hand-drawn)
No table of contents or chapter numbering — pages are numbered in circled numerals, not always in order

The opening manifesto

The book begins with a philosophical statement on language and geometry. The “today’s terrifying man made world” passage is here in full context:

I am the boss of these words, take complete responsibility for what they do. The great invention, language. I take it without letting it take me. I stay ahead of it because I know that it is like a trailer and will jack knife if you let it lead. It’s a human product for me to use, for you to use. I am an inventor and I start this way as an homage to our greatest invention, language. No contracts to sign, no electrical or mechanical breakdowns, no cornering of parts… The most beautiful of inventions, an invention of such an order that today I know it isn’t so that we are only some debris in front of a bulldozer blade on our way out. We invented language, we can improve today’s terrifying man made world.

The “cube” as threat: “Is the cube as they say ‘dead’ or is it instead another type of life form that with its characteristic rectilinear grid is slowly taking over the planet like some kind of galactic impetigo?”

The escape: “These are instructions on how to almost break out of prison. The prison is the paucity of shapes to which we have in the past confined ourselves because of our technology-industry-education-economy… so that we find ourselves back with the man who works with branches, reeds and mud.”

Geometry content

Two dimensions

The book introduces Baer’s geometric vocabulary before the 3D work:

Zonagons (Baer’s spelling — later “zonohedron”): polygons where each side has another side parallel to it. Easy to distort without altering angles.
Centrally symmetric polygons: a special subclass; “ALL CENTRALLY SYMMETRIC FOUR AND SIX SIDED FIGURES TILE” — these are the parallelogons.
Tiling polygons: only 3, 4, and 6-sided convex polygons tile (triangle, square, hexagon)
Repligons: polygons that can fission into smaller similar copies. Triangle and parallelogram are repligons; hexagon is not, but can be divided into suitable components.
The building form question: “That form made by the external walls of the component rooms when each room has the optimum shape possible while maintaining its membership in a regular or irregular close packing family and when the rooms are connected together as best possible.”

Three dimensions

The five regular polyhedra (Platonic solids): tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron
The 13 Archimedean solids — “all these drawings were taken from Fejes Toth’s Regular Figures”
Zonahedra definition: “a convex polyhedron all of whose faces are zonagons” — easy to distort without altering angles; any zone can be stretched/compressed by lengthening/shortening its edges
Parallelohedra: zonahedra that tile space by parallel displacements; first investigated by Russian crystallographer E.S. Federov (1890); five kinds. The derivation of the five families invented by Russian mathematician Boris N. Delaunay.
Stars: “a bristle of lines passing through a common point, one line equal and parallel to each zone of the zonahedron.” With n lines: n(n-1)/2 different face types; n(n-1) total faces.

Sources cited

“The first man to work with zonahedra was the Russian crystallographer Federov. He never realized that zonahedra could be defined with the simple definition at the start of this page… More recently zonahedra have been investigated by P. Donchian who predicted that they were 3D projections of four-dimensional figures — this has now been proved. I first read of zonahedra in H.S.M. Coxeter’s excellent book REGULAR POLYTOPES and in his contribution to W.W. Rouse Ball’s book MATHEMATICAL RECREATIONS & ESSAYS.”

Origin of the word “zome”

Page 24 contains the origin story, handwritten:

THE WORD ZOME. Steve & Durkee invented this word. We were talking about these structures and agreed that they really were not domes because they are not symmetrical. Stretching the zones of a zonahedra makes it asymmetrical. Durkee said “they are zones.” I was very excited by this word — it sounds right. The word doesn’t change any buildings but I kept waking up that night with the word going through my head. The next day at work Durkee and I kept saying things like — “well almost time to go zome.” I have also seen it as a protection. People kept calling these buildings geodesic domes and Fuller type domes. They aren’t. But I have sometimes been shy about using the word because it sounds to myself as if I were advertising something. It may be that inventing the word is more important to something’s use than the form itself.

“Durkee” is almost certainly Steve Durkee (later Brother William), a counterculture artist associated with New Buffalo commune and the Lama Foundation.

Origin timeline — Baer’s own account

December 1964, Zurich: Holly Baer made a rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron on the attic floor of her grandmother’s house in Switzerland. This is the earliest documented date for Baer’s zonohedra research — 3+ years before Drop City (1968).

“I first got interested in the geometric solids… when Holly made a rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron while we were living in Zurich. I started to play with them. In December 64 Connie [?] was thinking then… looking for figures in the spring of 65 in Albuquerque… I started and yet [Regular] Polytopes still fit it together.”

Spring 1965, Albuquerque: Baer already working on zonohedra geometry in Albuquerque, before Drop City was founded.

Switzerland (date uncertain): Baer and daughter Audrey blew soap bubbles together on the grandmother’s attic floor, studying how agglomerations of bubbles adjust to different forces. Reference: Soap Bubbles by C.V. Boys (Dover Press). Note: “this man also built a solar powered water pump on the Nile at the end of the last century.”

Saturday, April 1966: Baer’s first visit to Drop City. Handwritten journal entry:

“Visit Drop City. Forms, rebar mesh all in place to pour slab. Got my first dome — science fiction. Got high reading on top of the tallest building in Albuquerque — then up to one of these huge things [concrete slabs] under construction…” “Clark, Gene, Jo Ann, Richard. More than anything I was stunned by Drop City, who were these people?” “Seeing Drop City specially the mistakes and weak materials gave me great confidence.”

Monday after the visit: “Raven and Charles Allee and I poured the slab.”

October 1966: “Kitchen complex” construction note at Manera Nueva.

Construction content

CAR TOPS (page 21–22)

The main innovation of Drop City/Manera Nueva dome construction:

“Car tops are a good building material. They are cheap, strong, have an excellent paint job and are available almost everywhere.”

Gauge: 20 gauge (“butter tops”), others 18 and 19 gauge
Size: 45–52” wide, 50–70” long; station wagon up to 8’; van/mini-bus even more
Cutting rate: experienced man with axe = 5–6 tops/hour
Dave Park, General Salvage, Albuquerque: stockpile of ~1,000 car tops; cuts with spring-leaf tool driven by 3 lb machinist’s hammer
Tools: power saws with carborundum blades, electric nibblers, acetylene torches, pneumatic chisels
Chopping stance: one foot on open door, one foot on car; chop sides first, then front and back
Mandel Bell: Baer and Bell rented air compressor, marked shapes on cars, cut with pneumatic chisel — “eliminated at least two thirds of the work”
Price: 25 cents per top in New Mexico and Colorado. “The tin can only be sold as junk and in many places junking car bodies is so unprofitable that the yards give them to whoever will haul them away.”
Best contacts: men who haul car bodies to railhead or smelter

Car tops are compound curves — curved two ways at once like a sphere. Technique: measure sides along the curves; when cut and bent at sheet metal brake, measured distances straighten out into plane triangles. Patterns made of strips of flexible ¼” plywood. Best cutting: pneumatic chisel with top still anchored to car.

Connecting: drill holes in flanges, bolt with ¼” bolts. “I still haven’t tried welding the panels together.”

Zome made only with car tops: photograph shows “stretched enneacontahedron” — a 90-face zonahedron — made entirely of car top panels.

Dome panel construction

Panels must be stiff in two ways: bending stiffness AND outline-preserving stiffness
A frame without triangle bracing is “not stiff” — must be covered with triangular pattern
“Playing with models starts you off on this.”
Connecting panels: use wrecking bars, prying with screwdrivers, hoisting on end of a long pole, someone on scaffolding straining with his back
Dihedral angle / breaking angle: the wedge-shaped gap between panels; breaking angle A = supplement of dihedral angle B

Specific builds

Manera Nueva, Placitas, N.M. (four-dome cluster of “garnet domes”):

Construction: edge members first (piece by piece, not prefabed panels); sewer pipe + lag screw joints
Almost all faces had 4 sides → not rigid enough → added corner braces
Berry Hickman discovered: covering one dome greatly increased rigidity of neighboring domes — “evident there had been a good deal of play across the fusing walls”
Specifications at time of writing: four domes, three covered with car tops; fourth has most of perpendicular zone covered
Largest dome: 750 square feet; zones 7, 10.5, and 17.5 feet long; explosion 7 feet; 28 feet across; 34 feet long; top triangle 19 feet above floor
All lumber: 2”×6” pine obtained at 5 cents/foot as #2 grade (round bark-covered edges, other defects)

Llama (Lama Foundation) zome:

Built with 4”×6” lumber ripped at the breaking angle
Dimensions: 32 feet high, 46 feet from corner to corner
“The panels made this way fit together just right one after another”

Drop City kitchen complex:

Three fused exploded dodecahedra
Dihedral angle: 116°34’ (not 120°) — figures don’t fit perfectly; filled in 3°26’ slice gaps between domes

University of New Mexico: joined panels with angle iron hinges in “pinwheel” arrangement; flat faces pointing counterclockwise around panels from outside; sacred line through hinge hole centers

Joints

Manera Nueva joints: hierachy of faces — squares dominate rectangles, rectangles dominate diamonds. “The structure is exploded rhombic dodecahedra.” Edge member angles: triangles 60°/60°; rectangles 54°44’/70°32’; squares 90°/90°.

UNM angle iron specifications: 1¾” × 1¾” × ⅛”; 3/8” hinge bolt holes drilled .083’ (1 inch) from edge; leading face placed .600’ back from sacred line intersection.

The closing page (page 39)

Signed: Steve Baer, P.O. Box 422, Corrales New Mexico

Key passages:

“This summer Dave & Bill Karuschke are working with the Dibre Community in Colorado building some clusters of zomes. Berry Hickman is planning a 26’ dome built with only one kind of panel and one size dihedral angle at Manera Nueva. Ed Heinz is working on new designs at Drop City. Nancy Brickey and some other people are planning to build a geodesic dome…” “I am working on heating and cooling systems — so far without much luck.” “I hope this Fall to teach a class at U.N.M. in which we build a structure and experiment with solar heating.”

This is the archive’s earliest mention of Baer working on heating and cooling systems. Berry Hickman and Ed Heinz — both later Zomeworks co-founders — appear here as active collaborators before Zomeworks existed.

Baer on Fuller (page 38)

Extended handwritten commentary:

“I sent Fuller a letter about his [geodesic] kinds of Geodesic domes built in Germany in 1922… he didn’t answer my letter.” “I bought Fuller’s untitled Epic Poem on industrialization in London out 1963. I had never heard of Fuller and didn’t know what the strange looking structure was on the cover. I believe this is the best book Fuller has written. I have read it many times… I felt as if my mind were learning to swim.” “But what’s all this. Omni Directional Halo crap — I can’t understand it. Or why does he call it ‘Fuller Synergetic Treatment’ — why not a geometric transformation without his name in it?” [margin note: “sounds like a hair oil”] “In the book 20th Century Engineering there is a picture of a planetarium built in Germany in 1922 — it has the form of a multi frequency geodesic dome, who invented this form? I don’t believe it was Buckminster Fuller.”

Books cited (page 40)

Lyusternik — Convex Figures and Polyhedra, Dover Press — “$1.50 clear introduction”
Fejes Tóth — Regular Figures, MacMillan — “good illustrations, clearly explained”
Cundy & Rollett — Math Models, Oxford Press — “good illustrations, lists dihedral angles and duals of semi-regular Polyhedra”
Coxeter — Regular Polytopes, MacMillan — “explains zonahedra, excellent historical notes”
A.O. Alexandrov — Konvexe Polyeder, Akademie Verlag Berlin — “very clear and complete book by a great Russian Geometer. Not yet translated into English”
Keith Critchlow — Architectural Design, October 1965 — “Critchlow illustrates packing of pairs of figures which I believe he was the first to discover”

Named collaborators and associates (chronological in the book)

Name	Role
Holly Baer	Secretary of cookbook fund; made first rhombus-icoso-dodecahedron model (Zurich, Dec 1964)
Audrey Baer	Daughter; blew soap bubbles with Baer in Switzerland
Durkee (Steve Durkee?)	Co-invented the word “zome”
Clark (Richert)	Drop City founder named in April 1966 journal entry
Gene (Bernofsky)	Drop City co-founder
Jo Ann (Bernofsky)	Drop City co-founder
Richard	Named at Drop City (unclear who)
Raven	”Charles Allee and I poured the slab” (Monday after April 66 visit)
Charles Allee	Poured slab with Baer and Raven
Mandel Bell	Rented air compressor with Baer; cut car tops with pneumatic chisel
Dave Park	General Salvage, Albuquerque — ~1000 car tops stockpiled
Larry Lard	Made first wobbly car-top dome rock solid with sheet metal screws
Albert Maher	Helped install the second-to-last panel in a dramatic construction sequence
Berry Hickman	Discovered covering one dome stiffened neighbors; planned 26’ dome at Manera Nueva
Ed Heinz	Working on new designs at Drop City
Dave & Bill Karuschke	Working with Dibre Community in Colorado
Nancy Brickey	Planning a geodesic dome