In a quiet bend of the Appalachian hills, where creeks carve stories into the soil and the wind still knows your name, there is a home suspended gently above the land—not to conquer it, but to listen. It stands on columns like stilts, part shelter, part offering, hovering with reverence above a salamander’s sanctuary. “It’s probably the greenest home we’ve ever built,” says Ross Smith, founder of Assembly Architecture + Build. “And it almost didn’t look like that from the start. You’d never expect it, but it came from really listening to the site. That’s what we do.” Assembly Architecture + Build is not a firm that simply constructs houses. It composes them.