His elegantly raw canvases go well with a beautiful single sculpture by Ms. Truitt in the gallery's project room, a diptych of smoothly painted plywood slabs, one brownish red, the other almost black.

But in his 1988 exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art he included compositions of irregular plywood slabs finished to perfection as well as structures made of cardboard and foam and painted bright colors.

Ms. Zittel, famous for her nutty inventions for coping with modern life, has conceived a series of "sorting trays": thick plywood slabs with variously shaped compartments neatly cut in.

So did the roof - not concrete, but made of timbers with plywood slabs on top (the hole in the roof showed the layers) and a waterproof rubber sheet above that, with six inches of earth over everything.

The ceiling, though, had the same poor design: timbers with presumably plywood slabs, a rubber sheet, and earth on top.

On Friday morning, dozens of collectors wheeled their cartloads of containers into the center, shook off the snow and huddled near a space heater before sorting their cans and bottles by brand on large plywood slabs.

He keeps his bed made, his plywood slab of a front porch cleanly swept; he takes a coffee can shower every day amid piles of seething debris.

Angled steel columns support wide curving eaves over a triangular terrace, top left, and a spiral staircase made of folded plywood slabs hangs from a web of steel cables, above right.