Mary Ellen Carroll's work links the boundaries of language and architecture. She examines the cultural/linguistic construction of American identity and the notion of the melting pot.

Using a text by St. John de Crevecoeur, an early U.S. immigrant, Carroll has taken each word back to its etymological root and printed this on an eight by ten foot sheet of paper. This has the effect of a reconstruction of Babel. The question becomes that of the reestablishment of an historical identity through language. The collective identity is distilled to its uncertain historical uniqueness. This elimination of the melting pot reduces the collective to its fragments, or back to the "individual."The paradox is "individualism" as the hallmark of the American identity and the "silent majority's" desire to be confined by the comfort of consensus as being an American.