Pure Silver Ring

Made in New Zealand

The Brian Brake Ring is a sculptural piece of wearable architecture inspired by the modernist legacy of Titirangi and the celebrated pavilion-style home designed for photographer Brian Brake by architect Ron Sang in 1976. Situated in the lush bush of Auckland’s Waitākere Ranges, the house—described by Sang as “a tree-house suspended over the tree tops”—bridges landscape, architecture, and atmosphere.

Crafted through a process of architectural translation, the ring began with original house plans that were sand-cast in pure silver. Two silver bands beneath symbolise the dual pavilions connected by a bridge, spanning two fingers as an embodied reference to the home’s elevated platform. Silver deck and triangular elements evoke the site’s geometry and lightness, contrasting with the ring’s rectangular form.

Both statement piece and intimate artefact, the Brian Brake Ring transforms architectural history into wearable storytelling—connecting body, place, and modernist heritage through material, memory, and design.

Gina Hochstein is an Auckland-based artist, jeweller, and architectural academic whose practice sits at the intersection of jewellery, architecture, and embodied experience. Her creative output explores how objects worn on the body can function as intimate architectural sites—framing relationships between memory, identity, domesticity, and space.

Recently submitting a PhD in Creative Practice titled Dwelling in Jewellery at the University of Auckland, Gina investigates the underexplored relationship between women, modernist architecture, and jewellery through making, oral histories, and material experimentation. Her pieces often draw inspiration from New Zealand modernist houses, translating architectural elements into wearable forms that engage the body through tactility, movement, and sensation.

Alongside her studio practice, Gina contributes to architectural discourse through academic writing, conference presentations, exhibitions, and public talks that foreground gender, material culture, and creative practice. Her work has been presented in architectural and public forums, offering new perspectives on architecture as lived, embodied experience.

Each jewellery piece is both an artefact and a story—connecting body, place, and architectural memory through thoughtful craftsmanship and conceptual depth.