Project Statement: When William Faulkner wrote that “the past is never dead, it’s not even past”, he was referring to the deep and verdant culture of the American South. This startlingly simple and surprising notion applies equally to the American northeast, where the country’s foundational culture, with all its apocryphal formality, lives on in the colonial architecture that characterizes the historical towns of coastal New England. The crisp stateliness of the colonial style is an expression of the authority and culture brought from afar and incorporated into local settlements. What remains today highlights the ambiguity between the aspirations of the original builders and occupants of these dwellings and the pleasing, but perhaps superficial, and still unsettled effect of those aspirations.