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concepts · updated 2026-07-19

Bruce W. Davis

confidence: medium volatility: cold verified: 2026-06-29fresh

Bruce W. Davis is an American architect based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a member of the Solar Fools group. He has worked in passive solar and earth-building design since 1975, often collaboratin

Bruce W. Davis is an American architect based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and a member of the Solar Fools group. He has worked in passive solar and earth-building design since 1975, often collaborating with Steve Baer and Zomeworks.

Background

Davis arrived in New Mexico in 1973, during the early wave of passive solar construction. He joined a network of practitioners that included Steve Baer (Zomeworks), Peter Van Dresser (active solar houses in Abiquiú), and William Lumpkins (passive solar adobe). His long-time associate is architect Karen Terry.

His first passive solar house was designed in 1975. His projects consistently use:

  • Trombe walls in adobe or rammed earth, left exposed as sculptural elements behind glazing
  • Thermal mass — adobe walls added inside lightweight structures to increase heat storage
  • Water storage — when adobe is not practical, water drums (the Zomeworks DrumWall system) serve as thermal mass
  • Atrium-centered plans with solar hot water, temperature-actuated ceiling openings, and passive ventilation

Connection to the archive

The 2009 AIA slideshow by Steve Baer includes a slide showing a “Double Play™ System using Skymats™ to Cool Studio for Bruce Davis, Architect, Albuquerque, NM (2004)” and a “Water Wall Storage of Heat and Coolness, Davis Studio.” This places Davis as both a collaborator and a client of Zomeworks thermal systems.

The August 2004 Double Play progress report documents the installation in detail: 12 polypropylene Sky Mat radiator/absorbers on the garage roof (127 sq ft) cooled a 236 sq ft studio (half a converted garage) through 95°F summer days. Circulation was by thermosiphon — no pump. Storage was 42 vertical 4″ PVC drain pipes, plumbed by Tim James (a new Zomeworks hire), holding 200 gallons with 300 sq ft of surface area. Bruce Davis reported “great satisfaction: no noise, no fan and no added moisture.” The temperature chart covers July 22 through August 6, 2004.

The progress report closes with the next planned step: “a roll-formed aluminum or copper roof, which will include waterways so the thermally conductive roof can either radiate heat to the night sky or absorb heat from the sun” — the design that became the aluminum rolled formed roof drawing.

The Cap’A blog (a French architecture travel journal) documents a 2017 visit to Davis in Albuquerque. Davis describes his philosophy:

“Buildings have something like nervous systems. Things can be designed efficiently in the simplest way possible, without using the technological complexities deployed in European ‘Passiv House’ designs, which ultimately use ‘active’ systems. I have enormous doubts about the virtues of a building designed with technological systems destined to become obsolete within a few years.”

This echoes the archive’s recurring argument: passive systems outlast active ones because they have fewer parts to fail.

The Davis photographs

The existing archive-photographs.md page lists two files named 2004-08-bruce-davis-studio-double-play-1.jpg and 2004-08-bruce-davis-studio-double-play-2.jpg. These show the Davis studio where the Double Play system was installed — Sky Mat radiator/absorbers, thermosyphon cooling, August 2004.

The Sol-Mod house

The “Sol-Mod” is a small passive-solar modular house Davis designed with Karen Terry in New Mexico. It distills Davis’s recurring strategies — water-based thermal storage in place of adobe mass, daylight-driven heating, and simple passive systems with few moving parts — into a compact box lifted off the ground on concrete piers in a high-desert piñon-juniper setting.

Its defining feature is a vertical water wall used as a Trombe wall: behind tall fixed south glazing stands a row of translucent water-storage columns — the same DrumWall-family water-wall strategy Davis used at his Albuquerque studio, and the water substitute he adopts when adobe mass is impractical. The water stores solar heat admitted through the glass and releases it overnight. Per the Kayatekin double-play retrospective, the Sol-Mod “demonstrated that a vertical water Trombe wall could solar-heat a lightweight, off-grid building with stable day–night temperatures.” A band of operable clerestory windows under the roof overhang admits high winter sun and vents summer heat, and the corrugated aluminum ceiling is the underside of a roll-formed di-thermal roof. A min/max thermometer on the interior wall reflects the temperature-monitoring habit seen throughout the archive’s test buildings.

The Sol-Mod sits alongside Davis House 3 among Davis’s Trombe-wall-as-primary-heating houses (Davis House 3 used infilled concrete block; the Sol-Mod used the vertical water array, as in the Davis House 2 studio). Its drainable water array directly seeded Davis’s later, unbuilt Double Play 2.0 concept — a vertical, drainable internal array placed against south windows to heat as a Trombe wall in winter while remaining refillable for summer cooling. The house is documented by two photographs (interior © Marc Romanelli, 2011; exterior c. 2017).

See also