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1967-73<br>Steve Baer
Case study by:<br>Emily Silva,<br>Fri Oct 09 2015<br>` for child content! -->
A caption for the above image.
--> Manera Nueva<br>1960s 1970s radical-utopian residential Steve Baer<br>Manera Nueva, Placitas, NM, ca. 1968. Source: Steve Baer, Dome Cookbook (Corrales, NM: Lama Foundation, 1968), 24. Courtesy of Steve Baer.<br>Introduction
The year is 1968. I have made a pit stop off the highway, and am heading north down an old dirt road in Placitas, New Mexico. To the south, rapid changes are happening in Albuquerque as the city multiplies its nodes of commerce to accommodate a growing suburban community. This decentralization from downtown promotes new shopping centers and is my reason for travel. I am in search of a Santa Fe “charm” and aesthetic with which to ornament my newest development in Albuquerque. The post-war housing market is in full swing, and I will cash in.
The summer sun beats down on the hood of my car, and a brilliant red reflects into the desert landscape. I pull into a local motel to take a dip in the pool and ponder the very short distance I have traveled so far: a moment to soak in the rural atmosphere and escape from the people just a short distance away in Albuquerque. I park, glance back, and think about how dazzling my Cadillac looks in the summer sun. Just a few hours sunbathing at the pool and I feel cleansed. Though only a half hour away, I am sure I will see Santa Fe, its plazas, the culture, with a whole new set of eyes.
But just as I approach the parking lot, I realize something is very wrong. I remove my eyeglasses, clean the lenses, place them back on my nose. My car, less dazzling now, was not a convertible when I left it last. Sitting banged up and bruised, the top of my car has been hacked off. I look around for relief of any kind. How could this be?
With no one in sight, I take off in my vehicle heading further and further down the dirt road in Placitas. Just fifteen minutes down the road, I must be hallucinating. To my left, floating among the local grasses, a dome emerges. Bright blues, shiny reds, clad with triangular and hexagonal panels: now, multiple domes enter my sight. It is as though I have entered a Vonnegut novel, and traveled to the alien planet of Tralfamadore.1 I park. Nothing is stopping me from entering the countercultural commune at which I have arrived. I decide to run, gathering speed, but there, just ten feet in front of me, stands an axe. I look ahead upon the domes with their glossy panels. I retreat just a few steps. It is in that moment that I recognize my Cadillac top, now turned into building material for an experimental utopia—Manera Nueva.2
Manera Nueva, an Alternative Architecture
Manera Nueva, Spanish for “new way,” rose in Placitas, New Mexico as a community built on anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist ideals. Its residents and resident-builders sought to revert to the essentials of simpler times. The domes that made up this settlement – called “zomes” – were constructed from found materials.3 Most remarkable among these were car tops, which, used as exterior cladding, appeared as a colorful patchwork rising above the desert landscape. These suggested the do-it-yourself nature that pervaded the experiment at Manera Nueva and similar settlements, as well as their inhabitants’ frustration with the culture and objects that marked the postwar age. Constructed as a commune, Manera Nueva was to benefit its inhabitants through an economy of shared resources. In doing so, it represented new ideas and methods that were intended to provide freedom from consumerism and a utopian alternative to mid-century capitalism.
Arriving amidst the larger social movements of the late 1960s and a broader, growing frustration with modernism, Manera Nueva represented a form of “countercultural” architecture. Countercultural architecture refers to two types of alternative, experimental approaches that emerged in this era: on one hand, socially, politically, economically, and culturally critical schemes that came from architects themselves; on the other, similarly provocative and critical approaches that came from those operating outside the design fields, who likewise intervened in the built environment. Manera Nueva’s primary designer and protagonist, Steve Baer, belongs in the second category, as a mathematician and inventor who connected to architecture through an interest in geometry.4 Baer, born in 1938 in Los Angeles, studied at Amherst College in 1956 and returned to Los Angeles soon after. He completed some studies at UCLA, but later returned to Amherst to study number theory and calculus. By the end of the 1950s, he had moved to the Southwest, settling in Albuquerque. By 1960, he had joined the U.S. Army and, with his wife Holly, relocated to Germany. He returned to the U.S. several years later, moving...