The architectural librarian and curator Jill Lever, who has died aged 82, wrote in the final volume of the printed catalogue of the Drawings Collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects that if the publisher or cataloguers had known the immensity of the task, it would never have been started. Although cataloguing drawings may not seem a heroic activity, Lever’s innovative methods of description, high standards and persistence made it one. Through the series of printed catalogues that she wrote or edited, the entire drawings collection of the RIBA at the time was brought to wide attention, changing the way that architecture was studied and interpreted in Britain and internationally.
Before the 1940s, the institute had set little store by what the librarian James Palmes called its “haphazard accumulation of interesting and in some instances extremely valuable” drawings. Lever joined the RIBA library in the early 60s alongside John Harris, who had become the first curator of drawings in 1960.
In 1969, the first of the catalogue volumes appeared – large quartos in handsome blue buckram from the US publisher Gregg Press. These showed Lever’s cataloguing template specially devised for architectural drawings, including information about the buildings themselves and an extensive bibliography. Young historians, including Sandra Wedgwood covering the Pugin family and Gavin Stamp the Scott family, were recruited, and Lever received a Churchill travelling fellowship in 1978 to study the storage, cataloguing and conservation of architectural drawings in the US. She played an important role in the foundation in 1979 of ICAM, the International Confederation of Architectural Museums.
By 1984, 20 volumes with an index completed the project and Lever was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Her work brought to light forgotten or unrecognised architects and projects, especially from the 19th and 20th centuries, and opened the way for new research in these fields. In addition to her catalogue volumes, Lever’s other books included the Illustrated Glossary of Architecture 850-1830 (1966, with Harris) and Architects’ Designs for Furniture (1982).
Born in Brighton, East Sussex, Jill was a twin, one of the three children of the Irish-born Henry Power, a former soldier in the Irish Guards, who worked for Brighton council, and his wife, Gwenda (nee Griffiths), a nursery nurse. Leaving the Convent of the Blessed Sacrament school in 1952, she trained as a librarian in the public library in Brighton and met an architecture student, Jeremy Lever, whom she married in 1957.
Jeremy became a partner at Darbourne & Darke, working on their celebrated Lillington Gardens estate project in Pimlico, central London. Jill worked as librarian to several architectural practices, including Howell, Killick, Partridge & Amis, before joining the RIBA. With young children, she later shared her job with Margaret Richardson, taking an Open University degree at the same time.
In 1971, the drawings collection moved to separate premises at 21 Portman Square, under the high ceilings of a James Adam townhouse, where the Heinz gallery was established.
The trio of Harris, Lever and Richardson were well matched in their skills and the collection continued to grow. In 1984, Richardson moved to the Sir John Soane’s Museum and, in 1987, Harris resigned and Lever became curator. During this time she oversaw a lively exhibition programme that mixed historical and contemporary subjects – the latter including a 1988 retrospective of the architectural practice CZWG, where a dismembered London taxi, several fish tanks and rolled-up drawings stacked inside the immaculate vitrines were the main focus. Expertise was maintained in a bohemian atmosphere centred on the first-floor kitchen, where favoured readers were summoned to coffee by a hand bell and regaled with all the news of the day in architecture, conservation and much else besides.
After retirement in 1995, Lever, still dedicated to her task, then worked at the Soane Museum, first on a majestic catalogue of drawings by the elder and younger George Dance published in 2003, and afterwards on John Soane’s own drawings for online publication, a project now close to completion. In the process, she trained another generation in her specialism.
In later years Lever was an interviewer for the National Life Stories Architects’ Lives oral history scheme at the British Library, to which she brought knowledge and sympathy. These lengthy recordings included the knighted architects Hugh Casson, Geoffrey Jellicoe and Denys Lasdun, and also her husband; all are now accessible online.
Jill and Jeremy were a closely united couple. She always dressed with eye-catching, understated elegance and had her hair cut short at Molton Brown. In 1973 they completed two houses vertically stacked, on a slim wedge-shaped gap site in Notting Hill, with a steep drop from the street. Ingeniously planned by Jeremy on split levels and finished with timber-lined walls and brick floors, they are spacious, light-filled and, in the upper section (the Levers’ home), ornamented with pottery, wooden spoons and abstract paintings. The house won a RIBA award and was listed Grade II in 2012.
Jill’s twin brother, Barry, predeceased her. She is survived by Jeremy, their children, Jonathan and Emma, three grandchildren, and her brother Neil.
• Jill Rosemary Lever, librarian, curator and author, born 9 October 1935; died 22 November 2017
