Three houses are sited in the New River Valley of Southwestern Virginia in 1996. Each house is designed to provide the essential utilitarian resources necessary for habitation in modern Appalachia. The relative context within which to make each house has been found within the unique character of the individual sites. Each house exists within the current moment and place, so they therefore associate with a modern version of the Appalachian material palette: milled lumber, concrete and concrete block, raw and galvanized structural steel and roofing. The re-seeing of material is enabled through an understanding of the physical and metaphorical characteristics of chosen materials: chemical and physical properties, appearance, composition, regional presence, interaction with climate, structural capacity, manufacturing process, adaptability of form to standard construction and detail, etc.