concepts · updated 2026-08-10
Bruce Davis Studio
confidence: medium volatility: cold verified: 2026-08-10fresh
Bruce W. Davis's 236 sq ft Albuquerque studio — half of a converted garage at Davis House 2 — cooled from 2004 by a thermosiphon Double Play system: 12 Sky Mat radiator/absorbers (127 sq ft) on the garage roof feeding a vertical wall array of 4" PVC storage pipes. The first documented Zomeworks deployment at a collaborator's building.
The 236 sq ft Albuquerque studio of architect Bruce W. Davis — half of a converted garage, with a slab floor that helps even the temperature of the space. In 2004 it received a Double Play cooling installation designed and installed by Zomeworks Corporation — the first documented Zomeworks deployment at a collaborator’s building, confirming that the company’s systems were operating outside its own yard by 2004.
Per the Kayatekin retrospective (2025), the studio is a small detached space at “Davis House 2,” a former laundromat in Albuquerque that Davis remodeled in 1992–93. The double-play variation for it was designed collaboratively by Steve Baer and Davis in 2003.
The 2004 Double Play system
The August 2004 Zomeworks progress report documents the installation:
- Radiator: 12 polypropylene Sky Mat radiator/absorbers racked on the garage roof (127 sq ft), acting as heat radiators on summer nights.
- Circulation: by thermosiphon — no pump. A drainback pump for winter heating had not yet been installed.
- Storage: vertical 4″ PVC drain pipes inside the studio, doubling as a visual screen, with another wall of pipes at the south end — 200 gallons, 300 sq ft of surface area. The plumbing, with its 168 leak-free connections, was the work of Tim James, a new arrival to Albuquerque and Zomeworks; Baer wrote that “his very careful work made the plumbing of the forty-two 4″ PVC drain pipes a pleasing part of the design.”
- Pipe-count discrepancy: the contemporaneous progress report says forty-two pipes; Kayatekin (2025) says 38 pipes on two walls.
The vertical wall-mounted array was Davis’s requirement — he would not risk leaks over his drawings — while Baer preferred horizontal sub-ceiling arrays (as at Andy Shack) and reverted to them at Zomeworks afterward. Kayatekin identifies Davis’s vertical array as the germ of his later, unbuilt Trombe-wall-hybrid “Double Play 2.0” concept.
Performance
The progress report’s temperature chart covers July 22 through August 6, 2004: the 127 sq ft of Sky Mats kept the studio comfortable through days with 95°F highs, even with a gas water heater in one corner adding load around the clock. Kayatekin summarizes the result as the studio holding 73.5–78°F while ambient ranged 58–94.5°F. Davis reported “great satisfaction: no noise, no fan and no added moisture as in his house, which is cooled by an evaporative cooler.”
Role in the Zomeworks story
The September 2004 “Dear Shareholders” letter enclosed the studio’s pictures and temperature graph as proof of concept, and listed the studio among Zomeworks’ active prospects: “Bruce Davis continues to show his studio to his many clients and prospects.” The letter is also candid that the two-month-old retrofit “has not yet produced more work,” and its budget shows Zomeworks subsidized the job (the $50,000 prototype-subsidies line reads “as we did with the Davis job”). The progress report closes with the planned next step — a roll-formed aluminum or copper roof with waterways, the collector-roof concept documented in the aluminum rolled formed roof drawing.
The studio appears in Baer’s 2009 AIA passive solar slideshow as “Bruce Davis Studio / Double Play™ — Albuquerque, NM (2004),” alongside Andy Shack and the 2005 Zomeworks-roof Double Play demonstration unit.
Photographs
The archive holds two photographs from the August 2004 installation (see Archive photographs): one showing the Sky Mat roof radiators, the other the interior PVC pipe thermal storage / progress-report page — the earliest visual documentation of a Double Play installation on a collaborator’s building.