McGill Library
McLennan Library Building3459 rue McTavish
Montreal, Quebec
H3A 0C9
Gordon McLeod Pitts Fonds
Fonds
24 cm of textual records ; 2 scrapbooks ; 128 drawings and sketches ; 121 photographs
Gordon Mcleod Pitts was born in Fredericton, New Brunswick, in 1886. He worked as a railway engineer prior to obtaining his B.Sc. in 1908 and his M.Sc. in 1909 from McGill University. He taught Civil Engineering at McGill from 1908 to 1910, and again from 1915 to 1916 at which time McGill granted him the degree of B.Arch. He joined the Montreal architectural firm of Edward and W.S. Maxwell in 1919, and four years later formed the partnership of Maxwell and Pitts. Pitts thereafter became one of the Canada’s foremost architects, being elected President of both, the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada and the Province of Quebec Association of Architects. The McGill Graduates’ Society, in which Pitts participated actively, chose him as its President in 1940. In 1942 he became a member of McGill’s Board of Governors, and he was later chosen to represent the University on the Montreal City Council. As a councillor, Pitts worked actively in committees, contributing particularly in the area of traffic improvement and town planning. He rose to the position of Vice-Chairman of Montreal’s executive committee. He died in 1954.
The Gordon Mcleod Pitts fonds comprises mainly of material from his years at McGill University, particularly as a student of architecture, and includes architecture course notes, sketches, and annotated examination questions (1905-1916). Other records consist of an undated and unpublished illustrated essay on the History of the Buildings of McGill University including photos, sketches of the buildings, newspaper clippings (1911-1912), correspondence, blueprints concerning a proposed McGill skating arena, the Montreal Neurological Institute, and other McGill buildings (1934-1955). Two scrapbooks for the ’23 class of McGill Medicine including photos, newspaper articles, correspondence (1948-1952), as well as letters relating to the Graduates’ Society and the McGill News (1931-1935) are part of the collection. There are also several reports of McGill’s Building Committee and Real Estate Investment Committee.
Transferred from McGill's Blackader-Lauterman Architecture Library
Handwritten and typescript