Taste of honey: a small cabin in rural North Carolina built with intense attention to detail and understanding of materials.

The Moore Honeyhouse is a new addition to an apiarian smallholding near the top of Little Terrapin Mountain in North Carolina. The owner's house was designed by the architect in 1990, and a structure was required that could act as car port and be a place in which sought-after sourwood honey from neighbouring hives can be processed and stored.

The butterfly roof of the car port shelters the timber rectangular box that contains workbench and storage spaces. Both structures are made of tongue and grooved pine boards over rectangular section steel tubes. The box is propped on concrete block piers to prevent invasion by vermin, and to allow site water to run off naturally.

All the steel was allowed to rust for nine months to give a rich patina, then sealed with a penetrating compound. So the resulting metal members have a visual affinity for the warm wooden walls (though these will of course weather to greyer tints). Because of lack of skilled local labour, steel elements were fabricated in Arkansas (where the architect lives, many hundreds of miles from North Carolina) and shipped to the site, where the whole building was assembled in a month by an Arkansan team. From the road down the slope to the south-east, the most striking aspect of the little building is the gridded display wall, made from 8mm steel plates, 300mm deep arranged to form a pattern akin to very large stretcher (running) bond in brickwork. Horizontal steel plates are 300mm apart, making deep cells in which jars of honey can be put -- an orthogonal analogy of the bees' combs. The whole wall acts structurally like a species of Vierendeel truss, but it is made magic by its glazing.

Each cell is waterproofed by two sheets of glass angled to each other in the horizontal plane, cemented together and to the surrounding steel. This produces a complex faceted wall, sometimes transparent, often reflective of the surrounding trees and the sky, sometimes displaying the honey, occasionally secretively almost opaque. It can exhibit all these characteristics at the same time, depending on the weather and your position.

The jury decided to give the small building an award because it uses materials with great sensitivity, and sophistication, and it suggests new relationships between artefact and nature with the simplest of means -- all with great economy ($40 000).

RELATED ARTICLE: Architect

Marion Blackwell, architect, Arkansas

Project team

Marion Blackwell, Ati Blackwell, Dianne Meek, Phil Hadfield

Structural engineer

Joe Looney

Contractors

Razorback Ironworks + Pat Meek

Photographs

Richard Johnson