Some years ago, I judged a competition for an art gallery in Los Angeles. It was a competition open to the world and elicited hundreds of entries. The first round of judging became a huge materials-handling issue, as helpers carried the elephant-sized sheets slowly past we five judges seated on a dais and consigning the also-rans to the heap with nothing more than a downturned thumb, like a group of dissolute emperors and empresses.

I am pleased to say that this year’s Brick Bay Folly competition allowed plenty of time for the two dozen entries to be well picked over, for the ebb and flow of one or another’s fortunes to play out and for the judges’ biases to be well and truly revealed. We had had the advantage of private, prior viewing and came to the judging session armed with arguments for or against our favourites.

The five finalists were relatively easily sorted out; they were those that offered the delight of discovery upon entry or some sort of kinetic experience, while still seeming faintly buildable and robust enough to withstand exposure on an exposed part of the site.

Brick Bay’s Richard Didsbury has referred to the value of the competition arising from the necessity of translating beguiling computer renders into reality and the finalists all showed a spectacular combination of bravery and naïvety in this regard.

Ascent into Limbo proposes a journey through steel-mesh-defined volumes to end at a chimney-like element, from within which an oculus affords views of the sky. One is thus within an object within the park yet, simultaneously, curating one’s view of the park by the juxtaposition of the mesh.

The ambivalence of enclosure and observation is similarly proposed in The Sentimental Piece, a construction of interlocking timber elements suggestive of Chinese bracketing of the Tang Dynasty. It is organised to create an elongated cubic form through which one walks in homage to those who serve and who have suffered under COVID-19.

Enclosure of a different kind is proposed in Tūāhu; we are invited into a series of blue-painted conic forms composed of plywood skins perforated by repetitive shapes derived from Gordon Walters’ koru-based abstractions. The result is a more-centred interior space enlivened by the light and deconstructed landscape glimpsed through the perforations.

Genealogy of the Pacific also invites us into a perforated volume within a free-standing obelisk but, in this case, a cunning arrangement of common stacked elements conspires to create a tessellated surface that presents as a textured façade from afar, and an intimate and deeply incised surface when experienced intimately.

Bird in Cloud is a more singular object: a hyperactive totem clattering and flapping in the breeze, annoyingly difficult to ignore and raising a smile as it offers the passive observer sound and movement and the memory of our enthusiasm for the large wayside crayfish, carrot or bottle of L&P, the building as a duck.

This year’s judges are Pip Cheshire from Cheshire Architects, Philip Haycock from Naylor Love, Yusef Patel from Unitec, Karen Warman from Resene (represented by Karmen Dumper), Chris Barton from Architecture NZ, Richard and Anna Didsbury from Brick Bay, and Leo Zhu from last year’s winning Folly team, The Wood Pavilion.

Brick Bay Folly is sponsored by Resene, Naylor Love, Cheshire Architects, Unitec, University of Auckland, Sam Hartnett Photography and Architecture NZ/ArchitectureNow.