Steve Baer Quotes

Our present accounting system... can only discourage good house design. If the natural solar contribution to house heating from windows is ignored, then the designer knows this... No tax incentives—no credit to the sun in ERDA's graphs.

The forms possible using this system are limitless; there is no attempt here to explore these possibilities—the examples shown are small probings. The booklet describes the mathematics of the process that creates these limitless forms.

[I]t is very important to examine what the limits of an accounting system are—to know what the numbers and quantities... really mean.

The graphs which demonstrate a huge dependence on fossil fuels are fine in one respect. They are alarming. But they are... [m]isleading... [in] that they blind people to obvious answers and prime them to a frenzy of effort in poor directions. Attention... to such... trains people to attempt to deliver what is shown in these accounting systems rather than what is needed.

Tests done at Zomeworks on 45° sloped skylights with our insulating Skylids installed beneath a single pain of glass show a reduction of heat loss of about 75%... The louvers average 3" thick, have aluminum skins and are filled with figerglass—most of the heat loss occurs through air leaks...

[I]f folks don’t like the idea once they’ve given it the once-over, we’ll be glad to buy the plans back at the full $15.00 purchase price.

The regular polyhedra are like seeds from which growths may appear. They are the connecting joints for the zonohedra.

If you drive to... buy a newspaper the gasoline consumption appears. If you walk—using food energy—the event has disappeared from sight...

If you purchase certain kinds of hardware to exploit solar energy it will be accounted for and credit will be given to the sun. If you depend on more customary old-fashioned uses of solar energy, growing food, drying clothes, sun bathing, warming a house with south windows, the sun credit is totally ignored.

I want to build buildings and design systems that are beautiful and simple and that really work. ...It’s not ...exotic or earthshaking to fill 55-gallon drums with water, paint them black and place them in the walls of a home for use as solar collectors ...but it works.

[T]he philosophical tactics and... approach taken by the giant corporations and... power groups miss the point... A pencil can break on you and you can sharpen it with your thumbnail and go right on... but if a circuit board or a resistor or condenser quits somewhere inside this recorder, we’re stopped and there’s probably not a lot we can do about it. ...[Y]et we increasingly use tape recorders instead of pencils.

Zomes can cluster together like soap bubbles. Their zones can be stretched, shrunk, or omitted completely to make the various zomes' different shapes and sizes. The zomes can also pack several layers deep.

A sniper scope or camera... that shows... temperatures as... colors would be an enormous help to the investigator. 30 minutes with such... could be as valuable as a week's work... without it. ...[N]ature ...treats you to such a view of the window or skylight with a pattern of frost. ...[S]eals ...[are] the entire problem.

The , because of its shape and the arrangement of its structural members is extremely strong, but its uses are limited because of the inflexibility of its shape. It is always part of a sphere... any variation would destroy the structural properties... It is complicated in structure and simple in shape. Zomes are simple in structure and complicated in shape.

The design of houses can be stilted by such graphs.