The Double Play at Los Ranchos

A passive-solar demonstration building for the Larry P. Abraham Agri-Nature Center

A proposal to the Board — Village of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque

The one-paragraph version

Steve Baer, who lived and built two miles up the road in Corrales, invented a building that heats itself in winter and cools itself in summer using nothing but sunlight, water, and the night sky — no compressor, no refrigerant, and, in its first working version, not even a fan. He called it the Double Play. It has never had a permanent public home. One already exists and is available to us: a Double Play built inside a shipping container at Zomeworks, which Jose Baer — Steve Baer's son and the executor of his estate — is prepared to sell to the Village of Los Ranchos. This proposal asks the Board to give it a home at the Agri-Nature Center, where it would serve at once as a working farm tool, a hands-on classroom, an agritourism draw, and a fitting local memorial to a New Mexico original. It advances all three pillars of the Center's mission — education, research, and economic development — and it does so with a technology born in our own backyard.

The ask

1. Endorse the concept and authorize a short feasibility + siting study.
2. Direct staff to open acquisition talks with Jose Baer (Steve Baer's son and estate executor) for the existing Zomeworks Double Play container, and to explore programming and siting partnerships with the New Mexico Solar Energy Association (NMSEA) and the UNM School of Architecture.
3. Approve grant pursuit to fund the acquisition and installation (see Funding).

We are not asking for a large capital commitment today, and we are not asking the Village to build anything speculative. The unit already exists; it is the low-cost, movable shipping-container version; and the seller is the Baer family itself. We are asking for permission to turn an available object and a willing seller into a funded acquisition.

1. What the Double Play building is

The Double Play is a building that does two jobs — heating and cooling — with one simple set of hardware, and no mechanical air conditioning. It was developed by Zomeworks Corporation, the Albuquerque company founded by inventor Steve Baer around 1970. The name captures the idea: the same water, roof, and sunlight that heat the building in winter also cool it in summer. Baer called such a building a "double-play structure."

It belongs to a family of passive-solar ideas Baer spent his whole career on, beginning with a 1968 device to keep cattle stock-ponds from freezing (US Patent 3,618,569) and maturing into Zomeworks' commercial "Cool Cell" and "di-thermal roof" products. The Double Play is the building-scale version of that lineage.

It is a real, built thing — not a concept sketch. The best-documented working example is a studio built for Albuquerque architect Bruce Davis in 2004. A 236-square-foot room, cooled only by water and the night sky, held a steady 73.5–78 °F while the outside air swung between 58 and 94.5 °F over a two-week July–August test. The owner's verdict: "no noise, no fan, and no added moisture." Zomeworks has since built two demonstration outbuildings at its headquarters (one is used for meetings and tours) and has been testing a low-cost version built inside a 20-foot shipping container right here in Albuquerque. That container is the specific unit now available to the Village — a movable, self-contained Double Play that can be delivered and set in place rather than built on site.

2. How it works

The physics is old, honest, and easy to show a fourth-grader:

• A south-facing absorber and a rooftop radiator collect the sun's heat and, at night, let heat escape to the cold desert sky.
• Water stored in the ceiling (or in wall columns) is the battery. Water holds and moves heat about 3,500 times more effectively than air, which is why the whole system can be small and silent.
• In summer: warm air rises to the ceiling water mass and cool air settles back down; at night the rooftop coils dump the day's stored heat to the sky. The building wakes up cool.
• In winter: the roof and south absorbers gather solar heat into the water, and aluminum louvers open to let that warmth radiate gently down into the room. Close the louvers and the heat stays stored.
• Circulation is passive — a thermosiphon. Warm water rises, cool water sinks, and the loop drives itself. The 2004 studio ran with no pump at all.

Because roughly half of how the human body loses or gains heat is by radiation, a warm or cool surface overhead feels comfortable at air temperatures where a forced-air system would still be fighting. And because there is no compressor and no fan, there is almost nothing to break — and it keeps working in a power outage. For a farm, that last point is not a footnote.

3. Why it's famous

Steve Baer (1938–2024) is not a local curiosity — he is a figure the wider world of architecture and design takes seriously, and he did his life's work two miles from this site.

• He moved to Corrales in 1968, founded Zomeworks, and co-founded the New Mexico Solar Energy Association in 1972. New Mexico is, by common account, the birthplace of modern passive-solar science (the Los Alamos test-cell research of the 1970s wrote the field's first design handbooks). Baer is named among "the classic passive-solar entrepreneurs in New Mexico."
• His Zome House in Corrales is documented as a landmark: the Society of Architectural Historians calls it "one of the most innovative experiments in the use of passive solar energy to heat and cool a modern dwelling," and a technical university in the Netherlands (TU Delft) published a formal case study of it in 2018.
• His work is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London; he appeared in the counterculture bible the Whole Earth Catalog; he won the 1989 Passive Solar Pioneer Award and, in 2010, the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture under UNESCO patronage.
• The Double Play specifically is the subject of a 2025 peer-reviewed academic paper (Cem Kayatekin, ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology), which argues it is an overlooked but central innovation deserving preservation "before that knowledge is lost."

Baer died in May 2024. A Double Play building at the Agri-Nature Center would be the region's first permanent, public, walk-in memorial to a New Mexico inventor whose ideas the rest of the world is still studying.

4. How the farm and the public benefit

This is not decoration. The same physics that makes the Double Play comfortable makes it useful to a working regenerative farm in our exact climate — hot days, cool nights, sunny winters, the conditions Zomeworks says the system "works best" in.

For the farm:

• Season extension. Passive-solar growing structures using this same thermal-mass principle have held nighttime temperatures ~36 °F warmer than an unheated hoop house even when it was -22 °F outside, adding roughly a month of growing season on each end (University of Georgia Extension data). That is more chile, more greens, more market weeks.
• No-power produce storage. Thermal mass and earth coupling can hold a storage space at 32–40 °F with no electricity — passive cooling for the harvest and a comfortable wash-pack space in August.
• Resilience. With no compressor or fan, the building — and anything it is protecting — keeps its temperature through a grid outage.
• Lower operating cost. The U.S. Department of Energy finds good passive-solar design can cut heating costs to less than half; radiant systems in a hot-dry climate like ours have measured 17–42% energy savings versus conventional HVAC (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab).

For the public:

• A building that teaches itself. The best sustainability education comes from "living laboratories" where the building is the lesson — a model Cornell and several university botanical gardens (San Luis Obispo, UNC) have proven. Ours would carry visible water columns, louvers, and a temperature chart on the wall, exactly as Baer's test buildings did.
• STEM and energy literacy for school groups, farm campers, and Master Gardeners — heat, radiation, thermal mass, and the water cycle, all standing in one room you can walk into on a 100 °F day and feel the difference.
• A destination. It is a genuinely unusual, photogenic, story-rich structure — the kind of thing that gets people to drive to Los Ranchos, then stay for the growers market.

Every one of these lands squarely inside the Center's stated mission of education, research, and economic development and the Village's Master Plan 2035 goal of being a center of excellence in regenerative agriculture. We would not be proposing a new direction — we would be building the mission a home.

5. What would happen there — programming

A short menu of the activities that could revolve around the building:

Funding — how it gets paid for

The pilot is designed to be grant-funded, not tax-funded. Concrete routes:

• USDA Rural Energy for America Program (REAP) — funds renewable-energy / efficiency projects for rural ag operations, up to 50% of eligible cost.
• USDA Economic Impact Initiative Grants (NM) — explicitly prioritize "energy efficiency and education."
• USDA Rural Economic Development Grant — funds "facilities and equipment to educate and train rural residents."
• NM Economic Development Department rural/efficiency programs; a UNM School of Architecture partnership for siting and monitoring; and the New Mexico Solar Energy Association (NMSEA) — the 501(c)(3) solar-education nonprofit Steve Baer co-founded in 1972 — as the programming partner. NMSEA already runs school outreach, passive-solar showcases, and North Valley farm partnerships (Los Poblanos, Rio Grande Community Farm), so it can supply ready-made public education and may help underwrite or co-apply for education grants.

Start small and honest: the full custom building still needs cost-reduction work — Zomeworks says so plainly. That is exactly why the right first step is acquiring the existing low-cost shipping-container Double Play rather than commissioning a new build. It is a bounded, fundable, movable purchase from the Baer estate — a real object with a known seller — that proves the value before any larger commitment.

The next step

We ask the Board to authorize a feasibility + siting study and to direct staff to open acquisition conversations with Jose Baer and a siting/interpretation partnership with the UNM School of Architecture, with a grant-strategy memo to follow. A modest study now turns a willing seller and an available building into a funded acquisition — and puts a piece of New Mexico's own genius, from the family that created it, to work on the Center's mission.

Sources

From the Steve Baer / Zomeworks archive (this knowledge base):

• Steve Baer and the double-play thermosiphon — Kayatekin, ICON 2025 — wiki/concepts/steve-baer-double-play-thermosiphon.md
• Di-thermal roofs — wiki/concepts/di-thermal-roofs.md
• Bruce W. Davis (2004 Double Play studio) — wiki/people/bruce-w-davis.md
• Bruce Davis Studio — 2004 Double Play progress report — raw/articles/2004-08-bruce-davis-studio-double-play.md
• Double Play Structures — Zomeworks R&D page — raw/articles/2026-07-13-zomeworks-double-play-structures.md
• New Mexico Solar Energy Association (NMSEA) — raw/articles/2026-07-13-nmsea-nmsolar-org.md

External evidence (full URLs and confidence flags):

• Research digest — raw/notes/2026-07-13-double-play-los-ranchos-pitch-research.md

Confidence note: The Double Play system description and the 2004 built demo are high-confidence (verified vendor + archive + peer-reviewed sources). The two figures flagged for re-checking were both confirmed on 2026-07-13: the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH Archipedia) describes the Baer House (built 1971–72, following the Bridgers & Paxton Solar Building) as "one of the most innovative experiments in the use of passive solar energy to heat and cool a modern dwelling"; and the radiant-system energy savings of 17–42% vs. a VAV baseline are LBNL / UC-Berkeley CBE FLEXLAB findings, with the ~42% figure corresponding to hot-arid climates like ours (corroborated by PNNL-24904). Regional-heritage, farm-data, precedent, and funding figures are drawn from the cited external sources.