The first floor is clad in black timber, and the roof has four asymmetrical peaks clad in a rust-coloured steel.
The style of Abode combines gentle flat-roofed modernism with barn-like East Anglian forms, the main materials being buff brick variegated with dark textured strips, and black timber boarding.
It is made from a collection of purpose-built black timber containers that can be easily disassembled and relocated to playgrounds, allotments or youth centres in the area when the project is done.
After the war, Smith saw that his fellow Londoners were desperate for "half-decent" furniture and went back to his old trade, starting off in the front room of his house near London docks, using black-market timber.
Now, through October, visitors will discover a low black timber-framed pavilion that has an open-air secret garden inside.
Ted Zoli, the structural engineer who designed the bridge, said that about 100,000 pounds of black locust timber were used in the bridge's construction.
Grizzlies, black bears, timber wolves, arctic fox, wolverine, lynx and bobcat, along with some slightly less sexy items like raccoon and skunk (Toronto, wanna make some dough?), are also being sold in serious quantities to buyers predominantly hailing from China.
A blackbird sang so loudly from a tree overlooking the cloistered garden of this year's Serpentine gallery pavilion in London's Kensington Gardens, that it was all but impossible to hear what Peter Zumthor, its architect (below), was saying to press gathered to experience this extraordinary black-clad timber building that opens to the public on Friday.
The eventual goal is to use DNA mapping to combat the thriving black markets for timber in tropical countries that are plagued by illegal logging.
Mr. Suckling also says the Forest Service bolsters its cause by selectively quoting from historical records, in which early explorers describe the Ponderosa forests as "open and parklike". To counter this impression, he has unearthed old reports that speak of dark forests "black with heavy timber". But historical accounts are notoriously subjective.
