The home that will literally define our lives for twenty, thirty, forty years into the future, is not future oriented. Architecture must look into the future. Housebuilding, now an archaic laborious task at best, needs to be taken into the Twenty-First century and looked at by the ecologist, scientist, architect and engineer on a clean sheet of paper. Maximum use of renewable building materials. It should be used as close as possible to its natural state, but not untouched, as modern science can alter wood so that it will not rot, burn, or become food for insects.
Wood is solar energy transformed by photosynthesis into building material.
Enough wood grows every day in just the Southern US forests, to build 2000 homes. You don't get more sustainable than that. Catch the energy falling on the house, and latch on to the Geothermal Reserve in the Earth just beneath it. Use the excess heat from cooking, washing, and human activity in Winter, and design to get rid of it in Summer. Go with Nature instead of fighting, or isolating from it.