Colorado, 1984: bananas at 2,000 metres
Amory Lovins built his house at Old Snowmass, Colorado in 1984, high in the Rockies, and for years it doubled as the headquarters of the Rocky Mountain Institute. It's best known for the bananas growing inside it — a genuinely absurd crop for that altitude and latitude, and the point.
Not an add-on
The greenhouse isn't a sunroom at one end of the building. It sits at the centre as the thermal core: heavily glazed, passively heated, ringed by the rooms that draw off it. Paired with very serious insulation, that arrangement let the house get by without a conventional furnace in a place that gets properly cold.
The lesson we took
Where you put the glass decides what it does. Hung off the side, it's a nice room that's too hot in July. Placed so the rest of the building has to breathe through it, it becomes the heating system. It's the reason a Sophab wraps the wall your house actually lives against.
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