Why don't we use awnings anymore (2022)

Awnings have a nice property that fancy windows don’t: they can reduce heat gain in the summer while still allowing more heat gain in the winter. A nice south-facing window that lets the low winter sun in can provide a lot of desirable heat in the winter in a cold climate.

(Also, removing a given amount of summer heat via air conditioning is considerably cheaper than adding that same amount of winter heat via gas or heat pump in many climates, because the indoor-outdoor temperature difference is much higher in the winter.)

Even better, depending on climate, grape vines.

Our house (Australia) has trained vines on the sunny side that are thick with leaves and grapes in summer, bare and leafless in winter.

Ideal for seasonally sensible shade and warmth.

For those interested in digging into this passive solar design concerns itself with solar gain optimization. Passive house is a standard that makes use of these concepts as well but goes alot further.

Don't the vines damage the house?

English ivy (hedera helix) can damage mortar, but grape vines don't have holdfast structures like hedera that can sink into mortar. Plus, hedera helix is so dense that rotting vegetation and sheltered animals can also cause problems. Grapevines have tendrils that grab onto and twine around something like wires or a trellis.

They're on a free standing trellis that doesn't touch the house.

Two actually, a vertical mesh straight up from the garden bed adjacent to the brick paved verandah, and another that's almost horizontal with a slight slope away from the house.

Most of the summer growth is dense on the horizontal (like an awning) with grape bunches developing and hanging down for easy picking when rips.

Most vines, including Ivy don’t damage bricks walls that are build well. I don’t know about grapes but most ivy uses “suction cups” to trap on directly to the bricks. I think the misconception that they damage mortar might come from the moisture the plants can trap which can then damage the masonry. Or maybe it’s because the plants hide damage until it gets serious Mortar doesn’t last forever after all. Anyway, if you build your house or wall properly you can grow stuff on it with basically no downsides outside of having more bugs (and the things that eat them) on your wall that you might want.

It might not work so well on the Lego brick walls that are glued onto the front of concrete these days, but that would just be a guess.

If you go this route, design for the climate twenty years from now, not for twenty years ago.

(Speaking from experience—our house is an oven in the spring and fall because those seasons are 20F hotter than we assumed when designing the house.)

> are 20F hotter than we assumed when designing the house

Then you designed a house for a climate that never existed. There is nowhere on earth that is 20F warmer than it was 200 years ago, let alone 20.

Peak temperatures have gone up that much for the microclimate our house is in.

Put another way, air conditioning used to be unnecessary in Silicon Valley. Now we have > 100F days pretty much every year.

I'm dubious. If you pick the right threshold, you will surely find that the frequency of days above that threshold is massively increased. But that doesn't imply that the temperature is up 20F.

I certainly remember plenty of days in the mid-to-high-nineties in Silicon Valley 20 years ago.

Vitis vinifera has a deep vertical root that can fit in even narrow places and don't causes a lot of trouble. Climbing roses can vary, some are huge and they trow a lot of garbage, but short climbers normally are manageable. If they grow too much, you can just prune it to a desired size

Ivy or Wisteria are a different question. The first will damage walls and the second can crush anything like a vegetable python