What distinguishes Reynolds from the pack is that he has made thermal mass his first priority, and has demonstrated that it is best understood as the most powerful feature of a sustainable structure, perhaps the only essential feature. Not only has he located the proper starting point for sustainable architecture — a self-sufficient structure so solar-thermally efficient the power source is incidental — he’s made it functional. Not pretty to everyone’s eyes, but, as Reynolds says, “We’re building fully sustainable housing. And it’s tried and true.”

As a reward, he is largely excluded from architectural discussions. More than that: he is a counter-example, a punchline. He deserves a significant share of the responsibility for this. His contempt for design and most of the niceties of mass marketing and self-promotion haven’t provided much in the way of welcome for collaborators. Instead, he has performed most of his experiments among survival nuts and hard-core environmentalists, whose apocalyptic visions leave little room for the billions of us who live in cities far too intricately wound together to ever be rendered gridless by anything other than mass catastrophe. These incidental details, however, have almost entirely obscured the big picture.

On the walls of the Earthship visitors’ centre west of Taos, there are sketches of multi-level, multi-unit Earthships, great pyramid-shaped stacks of self-sufficient shelter — thermally massive, self-regulating mid-rise skyscrapers. I don’t know whether they’re feasible, but I do know that nobody’s looked into commissioning one. There’s a direct line of ancestry from Buckminster Fuller’s sustainability experiments, for example, to Norman Foster’s pace-setting work in more traditional forms; Reynolds, at present, remains mostly alone on his dusty patch of desert, waiting for a less fevered mind to link his innovations to the wider web of the mainstream.