Zome House

In 1966, after having taken various courses at UCLA in California and Amherst College in Massachusetts, doing a few years of service at an American army base in Germany and studying for several years at the ETH in Zurich, Steve Baer returned to the USA. He was fascinated by polyhedral forms, with which he had experimented while working as a welder in a metal shop, and came in contact with the artists who founded Drop City in Trinidad, Colorado. At that point he had more building experience than most of the ‘Droppers’ did, which led to his publishing the Dome Cookbook in 1968. Baer developed the ‘zome’ (a combination of ‘zonohedron’ and ‘dome’), a structure which, unlike a dome, can be elongated or linked in several directions. The first zomes were built in Drop City, with their façades usually consisting of the flattened tops of old cars…