June 30, 2023 | Blog.014

Jon Gould, AIA, is an Assistant Professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia. Hailing from Atlanta, GA, where he has worked for over a decade, he built his career focusing on multi-family, mixed use, and student housing. Jon has successfully led the AIA Atlanta High School Student Design competition for 11 years, giving out over $75,000 in scholarships to students seeking architecture higher education. In 2022, Jon began co-organizing Pride events within AIA Atlanta, serving as co-founder and chair of the AIA Georgia LGBTQIA+ Alliance beginning in 2023. In our conversation, we talk about Jon’s history and upbringing in architecture, in activism, and in alliances.

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Can you start by sharing a bit about how you got into architecture?

A little bit about me. I got into architecture because my mom was an office manager for TVS as early as actually the late 70s. I think. As an office manager, she worked for Steinbach over at TVS and then worked with a couple other firms. So she always had this passion and connection to architecture and design. When I was born, she worked for Carol Richard. Carol Richard and Janice Wittschiebe were a female owned firm. Carol designed the house I grew up in. It was like Carol Richards's first project as a young architect. My mom wanted to have an architect working on a project, obviously supporting female architects as well. I kind of was always around architecture in this like weird sideways way; my mom working at architecture firms, being in a house that was designed by an architect. I knew who that architect was, I met them and talked about it. We also had a full model of the house that I lived in. One of the things we talked about a lot in the pipeline conversation is that you can't be an architect unless you know what an architect is. And so for me, I knew what an architect was at a very early age. And it also helped that my mom had kind of starry eyes around them. She always talked very fondly of the architects that she knew she worked with. So it kind of pushed me in that direction a little bit. I knew from a very early age, I wanted to be an architect.

So you went to Arizona and then came back to Atlanta?

Yeah. You know, one of the reasons I went to Arizona was because it was a very large school that had a sizable gay population. In 2005, I graduated high school. In 2004, George Bush had just been reelected, 13 states just passed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Georgia was one of them. I'm pretty sure Arizona was too. So it wasn't like I was going to a super liberal area, but Arizona State had a large, very diverse student population. It had this College of Architecture, but it also had art, theater, mathematics; it had everything right there.

They had a pride office and everything else. It was called the LGBTQIA Coalition. I joined Sigma Phi Beta, which is a gay straight allied fraternity. It unfortunately no longer exists, but Arizona State was the beta chapter of it. We were just getting started. It was 2005, there was a lot of energy around it around, you know, queer people wanting to be part of straight spaces. Having some sort of authentic representation.

We were not using the word queer at the time. We did include transgender members, which was a big deal in 2004/2005. Gender was still thought of so frequently as binary. I joined Sigma Phi Beta and became president of my local chapter. We had a thing happen - gay people got more acceptance. So the need for a queer fraternity kind of diminished in a weird way. There is always a conversation around - why do you need a gay fraternity, why can't you just join a fraternity? Well, the answer is we've been excluded for a long time. So we created our own. But there was a lot of conversation about identity and where you fall on that spectrum.

I graduated from Arizona State in 2009, which was the middle of the recession. I knew I needed to go to grad school at some point and when markets crashed in October, I was like, well, guess I have three months to get my grad school application in. I graduated from Georgia Tech in 2012, worked here in Atlanta, got involved with AIA through Georgia Tech. My last semester at Georgia Tech, I only had studio to take because I taken some summer classes because I couldn't get a job and I needed money to eat and live, so I had to take out student loans and had to take classes. Since I didn’t have any classes the final semester, I actually volunteered at the AIA Atlanta office two days a week archiving. There was a woman there, who was a lesbian, and she was a retired archivist from Georgia State. She mentored me in how to archive stuff. The main piece of advice I learned from her was that digital records suck. She said, if someone gave you a floppy disk now would you even be able to read it? So anyway, that’s how I got involved with AIA Atlanta.

It sounds like you have a long history of engagement and advocacy in working towards equity. Where did that come from for you? Has that always been something you had an early awareness to or was there a specific moment it began for you?

My history of advocacy comes from my dad. He's always been very politically active. I think coming out in 2004 forces you to be politically active in a lot of ways. It got me involved in a lot of organizations. There was one in Atlanta called Youth Pride at the time. You could drop in and hang out after school. They had Wednesday night group sessions and they did a lot of political activism through things like Capitol days. My dad and I went down there for Youth Day at the Capitol and as we were walking back to the car and he met up with a few of his colleagues. One of his colleagues asked what he was there for (his son was there with the Young Republicans of Douglasville). My dad responded that we were out here for LGBTQ events, for gay days at the Capitol; he was super supportive.

This has just always been part of my coming out journey. It was important for my coming out journey because I looked for the spaces to find other queer people. Because they didn't exist, right. They just weren't. I said this several times just how fortunate I was to be able to do that, to have a high school in Georgia that allowed a gay straight alliance with very little pushback. At the time, they were banning proms from having gay people go to them.

You mentioned that early on you were looking for these spaces to find other queer people. I'm wondering, did you feel the same when you entered the profession and started working, that there was kind of like a lack of queer people, space for queer people or did you not quite feel that by the time you were starting to practice and work?

By the time I started working, I had a network of close and queer friends outside of work. It was actually a bit hard for me to make friends at work, because my weekends and after work activities, were always “hey I have to go somewhere else.” In college and in high school, I needed to build that community up. But when I started working, I had that community built up through other networks, so I didn't need it through my workplace. I will say, I definitely kept an eye out for any queer people that started at my job and made an effort to introduce myself and try to connect with them. I made that conscious effort to make sure that this place was queer friendly, especially in my work environments. I think I made it a point to come out at my work.

In closing, can you share a bit about what your hopes are? What impact you hope to have?

I think part of this has to do with timing and part with need. There are more queer people who are out and who are architects. There's a critical mass happening now that had not happened before. You can look to the last generation and the AIDS epidemic in the 80s impacting today, where we don’t have this critical mass or broad network of elder queers. So there's this little bit of a lost generation of queer people in the profession. I mean, by definition, I am a quintessential millennial, graduated high school in 2005, and was activated by this political backlash. Now I'm 35 and have the time, the ability, and the want to dedicate myself to this type of activism. At the same time, there is also the critical mass of people who are looking for it and need it. If we did this like five or 10 years ago, our meetings would only be one or two people, right? It would be us struggling to get through. And now we have over 15 people coming to meetings for an AIA LGBTQIA Alliance in Georgia? People are saying, we want to be here and get involved. Tell us what we need to do. Where I am now is to create these professional networks outside of workplace environments, because you may be the only queer person at your work and you may be looking for that queer environment. While you may find it at the bar or through another group or something else, it would be damn nice to have a professional network out there.