brick bay folly 2016: DAUGHTER OF THE SWAMP

Architecture graduates Alexander Sacha Milojevic and Raphaela Rose, alongside Masters of Architecture (Professional) student Ryan David Mahon and geotechnical engineer Edward Roberts won the 2016 Brick Bay Folly Competition with their work entitled Daughter of the Swamp.

The winning team’s work Daughter of the Swamp was inspired by an eel-pot or hīnaki form. Referencing mythology and Maui, who legend has it was first to catch the long eel, and his wife Hina, the daughter of the Swamp.

Adhering to folly tradition, Daughter of the Swamp provides no practical protection, only spatial definition. Instead it offers a bright interface between the viewer and the surrounding landscape that is observed through the gaps in the inter-laced steel.

The groups intention was for the folly to “re-contextualise the material of the reinforcing bar. The steel, with its heavy associations of industrial progress and the modern age is put to an unexpected almost contradictory use in its emulation of a soft, traditional organic object. By overlapping and repeating forms, an effect like that of the delicately woven eel traps is achieved. It is informed by the historic hīnaki, but formed from contemporary materials and rests beside the enduring lake and swamp. It simultaneously speaks of historic cultural artefacts and our modern day material condition.’