Brown vs. Brown

I just really wish that somebody who's done the glass wall pavilion off the coast of Matakana wasn't saying 'Neutra. Neutra, Neutra' but were saying 'Mark-Brown/Fairhead'. The irony is that the New Zealand we live in is the world that Mark-Brown/Fairhead were kinda looking for. It was a global experience.

– Historian Douglas Lloyd Jenkins on the quiet influence of architects Peter Mark-Brown and Alan Fairhead

The Internationalists probably haven't been given as much attention as the regionalists, still...

– Architecture professor Julia Gatley on the influence of the internationalist style being underrated in New Zealand

He's just a genius. I think everyone credits Frank Lloyd Wright as the master of modernism. But I think Richard Neutra probably is more important, and he did this house in Palm Springs, called the Kaufman House, it's worth looking up. I think it's the most beautiful house in the world, 1946 or something, still looks more modern than anything in New Zealand.

– Director Simon Mark-Brown on Californian architect Richard Neutra, Radio New Zealand, 1 May 2023

There was one architecture school in the 50s in Auckland, run by a guy called Vernon Brown, an English architect, and he was a regionalist, who was looking for our new vernacular for New Zealand modernism; woody and modest and sort of inward-looking, he thought New Zealand had its own identity with the wool shed and the whare. Other students there, like my father, and a bunch of others, were internationalists looking outward to the world where they wanted any inspiration, wherever the best inspiration was, Japan and Europe and mainly California, the sort of home of mid-century modern.

– Director Simon Mark-Brown on his father and stylistic clashes in 1950s Kiwi architecture, Radio New Zealand, 1 May 2023