This year marks a special milestone for the Brick Bay Folly programme. It is celebrating 10 years since its launch, when the fantastical, rubber-tyre-clad Belly of the Beast took up residence high on a hill overlooking the sculpture park.

Today, a decade on, a folly rivalling the first in both height and presence has appeared on a new site, the third to be activated, extending the lives of the follies on show from two years to three.

Yellow Post is a towering, whimsical structure made up of 12 eleven-metre-high, tapering glulam posts, with 24 fabric sheets embedded into the project’s horizontal split-beam members.

The origins of the design pay homage to the historic hākari scaffold stages once built by iwi in the Northland settlement of Kororāreka as centrepieces for communal ceremony, celebration and congregation. Folly designers George Culling, Oliver Prisk, Henry Mabin and André Vachias first learnt of these structures in Robin Skinner’s lectures at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington’s School of Architecture.

“What really struck us was how these monumental timber edifices articulated a delicacy and consideration towards temporal building,” says Prisk. “The scaffold structure was often fully erected for only a number of days before disassembly, so the concept responded well to the folly brief in terms of both its temporary nature and it being a place to gather and celebrate.” 

Conscious that the illustrations studied in Skinner’s class were representations of an indigenous structure through a colonial lens, the folly team engaged with local iwi Ngāti Manuhiri to learn more about the significance of the hākari.

Changes to the initial design were fairly minimal. “On advice from mentor Pip Cheshire, the structure rose from its original planned height of 8.5 metres to 11 metres,” says Prisk. “It was a good move – the increased elevation has resulted in a really strong gesture that holds the corner of the new site well and it is now a real marker in its place.” 

Culling points out that the location of the new site, while isolated, is still very visible. “No matter where you are, you will see it and it will greet you,” he says, “and the bright, welcoming hue of the Resene Broom yellow contrasts with the natural hues of the landscape.”

As with any folly project, it came with several challenges and many learnings along the way, all of which are intentionally at the heart of the programme.

“From the outset, our mentors made it very clear that buildability would be critical to the project’s success,” says Culling. “So, we had a lot of early engagement with mentors Steve Cassidy, Peter Boardman and Gabriela Tufare, really getting into the nuts and bolts of how everything comes together on site.”

The team members put the success of the build down to staying on site throughout the process, waking to sheep outside their tents each morning before donning their tool belts and beginning their 10-hour days. They were also very fortunate to have ex-classmate and building apprentice Elliot Western on hand to help with construction, enabling them to avoid a degree of trial and error, and to cut their build time considerably.

Mabin describes a complex scaffolding design, which was critical when navigating the tapered geometry to gain full access to fix the fabric within the split beams. He also points out that the screw pile foundation system, a conscious sustainability driver of the design, required a slight work-around on site, highlighting “the beauty of the process, where you throw away the drawings and rely on critical thinking and problem-solving to arrive at a solution”.

The 12 posts coming down to the ground had to align with the 12 screw piles on the grid and be of three different staggered heights because of the slope on which they were working. “They were definitely a challenge; however, they worked and did away with the use of concrete piles,” says Vachias.

Another point the team could laugh about in hindsight was the amount of time spent on painting. “We had to paint everything,” says Prisk, “through all of December, leading up to Christmas. Looking back, perhaps we should have grabbed every man and his dog to help out.” We’re talking 20 litres of undercoat and 40 litres of topcoat over about 150 pieces of regular timber.

Thankfully, the fabric sheets were supplied ready to go, eyelets included, by a flag company in Christchurch. “The main gesture is the yellow posts but we also wanted a secondary element to complement that,” explains Vachias. “Initially, we had planned to have the fabric sheets attached at the outside edges of the folly but we ended up integrating them within the form itself.”

“The original hākari were built with slender sticks of kauri and pūriri, lashed together with torutoru vines,” says Culling. “The structures contained terraced stages, which stored kai for the gatherings. We tried to extrapolate this internal element through the use of the fabric sheets to create that dialogue between structure and what is held within the structure.’’

The white, almost iridescent fabric now wraps between the horizontal pieces, giving increased body to the visual mass of the structure and playing with and capturing the light and shadow.

The scale, proportion and height of Yellow Post delivers a feeling of what the team describes as ‘structural wonderness’ and a real sense of satisfaction that they were able to realise their design and come in within budget.

“The Yellow Post is one of very few beguiling projects that are at once simple, logical and coherent, yet evocative of precedent,” says folly judge and mentor Pip Cheshire.

“This has been achieved by, as Sir Miles Warren would say, ‘throwing a double six’ on the first day of the competition: a strong idea pared back to its essentials then exhaustively examined to ensure its realisation does all that is necessary, but no more. The team is to be congratulated on its celebration of the new Brick Bay folly site with a striking project.”

This year’s judges were Pip Cheshire from Cheshire Architects, Steve Cassidy from Cassidy Construction, Karmen Hoare from Resene, Peter Boardman from Structure Design, Keith Mann from Unitec, Amanda Harkness from Architecture NZ, Richard and Anna Didsbury from Brick Bay and Jennifer Gao from the 2024 Folly winning team, whose folly was named Femme-ly Velues. Brick Bay Folly is sponsored by Resene, Cassidy Construction, Cheshire Architects, Structure Design, Unitec, Architecture NZ, ArchitectureNow, Sam Hartnett Photography and Brick Bay.