“What does a house do? Can a house be a sculpture? Can you live inside an artwork?” These are just some of the questions that the Los Angeles-based artist Oscar Tuazon is posing with the cavernous, honeycomb-shaped wooden structure he has erected on the Messeplatz in Basel. Zome Alloy (2016) is a pared-down version of Steve Baer’s Zome House (1972) outside Corrales in New Mexico, where the beatnik solar engineer and architect still lives with his wife, Holly.
Baer developed his Zome design for housing—characterised by extendable clusters of fused wooden polyhedra clad in aluminium—at Drop City, a hippie commune formed in southern Colorado in 1965. Tuazon describes visiting Baer for the first time, in New Mexico in the early 2000s. “He gave me a hard time. I had the idea that Drop City was a piece of land art; I thought of Baer like an outlaw Robert Smithson, making site-responsive work that you could live in,” Tuazon says. “[But] Baer is like Michael Heizer—he inhabits his work. It’s his house, and the work he does is local; he lives there.”
Just as Baer took the principles of successful design in American architecture and updated them using contemporary techniques and materials, Tuazon has used new technology to create Zome Alloy. Using a 3D survey of Baer’s house, Tuazon has developed a panel system that has been manufactured by a robot in Switzerland. “Zome Alloy was built in a fraction of the time it took Steve and Holly to build their house using conventional construction techniques. The fantasy of plug-and-play architecture has arrived, and it’s time to play,” Tuazon says.
The artist’s installation is also hosting the second Alloy Conference after Baer’s original, which took place in La Luz, New Mexico, in 1969. On Wednesday, Holly and Steve Baer are due to take part in a discussion with Tuazon about the history of experimental solar and energy-efficient design. It is the couple’s area of expertise: the Zome House is an early example of a passive solar-energy system, and their company, Zomeworks, is still a leader in the field. Tuazon says that energy efficiency has become a “central tenet of contemporary design”, although many of Baer’s most simple, but radical, ideas “have been met with resistance, if not outright hostility, by the construction industry”.
The other topics to be covered by the Alloy Conference are DIY manuals and outlaw architecture, what it means to grow a building today and building for environmental extremes. The speakers include Piet Vollaard, an architect and a professor at Delft University of Technology, the US architect Steven Holl, the artist and performer Benjamin Seror and Larissa Harris, a curator at the Queens Museum, New York.
The last topic is perhaps the most pressing, given the urgent need to develop energy-efficient techniques in the face of climate change. And it seems that Tuazon is in search of a solution. He asks: “If we were to redesign the Zome today, to bring it up to code for an era of climate extremes, what are the important innovations to include in the Zome House version 2.0?"
Alloy Conference, Zome Alloy, Messeplatz
Wednesday 15 June
• 3.30pm-5.30pm, Sun Riot: History of Experimental Solar and Energy-Efficient Design—Steve and Holly Baer in conversation with Oscar Tuazon and Rahel Hartmann Schweizer
• 6pm-8pm, Publishing: DIY Manuals and Outlaw Architecture
Thursday 16 June
• 3.30pm-5.30pm, Alive Architecture
• 6pm-8pm, Techniques for Today: Building for Environmental Extremes
• Messeplatz, Basel, Oscar Tuazon, Zome Alloy, until 19 June
