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From left, Pip Cheshire, Rita Cai, Richard Didsbury, Daniel Ho and Raymond Yoo.
The delivery of the sixth, and latest, folly at the Brick Bay Sculpture Park was a little delayed due to Covid-19 restrictions, but is now open to the public.
A six-metre tall white structure made from 4425 timber layers, in 885 modules or bricks, is the latest ‘folly’ to be unveiled at the Brick Bay Sculpture Trail.
The sixth annual Folly Competition drew 24 entries from architectural students and recent graduates from around New Zealand.
The winning folly, titled Genealogy of the Pacific, is the work of three University of Auckland students – Daniel Ho, Raymond Yoo and Rita Cai – who drew inspiration from the curvilinear form of DNA strands.
The folly jury was led by architect, writer and recipient of the NZIA Gold Medal, Pip Cheshire, and also included Philip Haycock from Naylor Love, Karmen Dumper from Resene, Yusef Patel from the School of Architecture Unitec, Chris Barton from Architecture NZ, Richard and Anna Didsbury from Brick Bay, and Leo Zhu from the 2019 winning team, The Wood Pavilion.
At an event in March to celebrate the latest folly, Pip said the competition challenges students to take something from their imagination and make it a reality. He added that moving from a digital design to the completed piece was seldom a smooth process.
Philip Haycock congratulated the winning team and said their folly involved a lot of science and structural secrets.
Speaking on behalf of the winners, Daniel Ho said they were very grateful for the opportunity, even though the pressure of the experience had nearly overwhelmed them.
“We feel we’ve learned so much that we wouldn’t have learned without this experience,” he said. “By going beyond our status quo of drawings and scale models, we were introduced to many challenges we had never encountered in architecture school.”
The winning team received $30,000 to build their folly, with Pip Cheshire providing advice and mentoring.
The Brick Bay Folly Project started in 2015 with the first winning structure Belly of the Beast. It provides an opportunity for emerging architects to test their ideas on a real life project, manage construction, solve contingencies and participate in the physical construction.
