Inspiration. Not always a feeling so easily quantified. A given time, place, event, people or person. We all have our individual influences. But how would you quantify the contribution of one man's effect on the lineage of New Zealand architecture?

Vernon Brown was an architect, teacher and continual artist who occupied a pivotal point in this history. Vernon was an immigrant, always the Englishman, but also a New Zealander. How did such a man, credited with developing a vernacular approach to domestic architecture in New Zealand, contribute so much to our society? Was it through the built works that remain for us to study and enjoy? Or does his influence go deeper? For my Master of Architecture thesis, I am researching Vernon's place within the New Zealand modernist movement and, more particularly, his influence through the students he taught.

Vernon became a design studio master in 1942, teaching at the Auckland School of Architecture. Many of the now well-known names in New Zealand architecture passed through the school as students during his time there. What measurable inspirational effect did he have on these students? This is something that can only be understood by gathering as many anecdotal stories as possible from these former students, now masters themselves.

As a studio master, one of a group of tutors, Vernon worked within the studio and seldom lectured. He could be seen walking around the studios, flamboyantly waving a watercolour brush while discussing students' work in open forum critiques. These were not dry discussions. Vernon invariably turned such occasions into dramatic performances, putting the fear of God into those whose designs were truly an insult to his eye, while exalting those who deserved praise.

Bill Toomath recalls a studio critique for a display stage for a fashion show, for which most students had designed a proscenium arch.

"One in particular was a gaudy arrangement (it wasn't mine) of a kind of a semicircular opening with receding planes of hues of fairly bright reds going into pink. I well recall Vernon's comment when he disdainfully flipped his hand to it and said, 'We will have no more of these inflamed orifices!'"

As a third-year gouache atelier student, Sir Miles Warren remembers waiting for the smallest scrap of praise from Vernon. "Vernon was God."

On one occasion, he recalls, "Vernon came to my drawings. 'An odd sequence of spaces. Look how Warren has organised these spaces, starting wide, now narrowing and then expanding again.' (I rose into heaven.) 'And then what does he place at the culmination of his grand axis? The goddamned bogs!' (Roars of laughter)."

The worst that could happen? "[He would] come to one's drawings and say, 'There's nothing to be said about this.'"

As well as being personable within the school, Vernon was sociable outside school hours. Students occasionally spent Sundays at his house on Victoria Avenue, alongside a group known as the Mongolfia Society.