Emery Stanford Hall, FAIA

Emery Stanford Hall never served as NCARB president, but the Council wouldn’t exist without him. He organized the first meeting in 1919 to discuss forming the organization that would become NCARB, and was elected by his peers to serve as secretary—a position that is now more similar to the executive. Hall raised the money necessary to get the organization off the ground—acquiring a loan from the Illinois Society of Architects (of which he was chair at the time) and providing money out of his own pocket during the lean years of the Depression. Hall also volunteered countless hours of time to the Council’s success. He drafted NCARB’s first Bylaws and set up the organization’s first headquarters in his Chicago firm—it remained there until his death in 1939.