In recognition of his efforts, Mr. Gavin was presented with a Julian Francis Abele Award in 2002 from the Philadelphia Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects. Abele, an African American architect, was one of the designers of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
For more than 20 years, Mr. Gavin volunteered his time to teach architecture to public school students. He was active with Architecture in Schools, sponsored by the Foundation for Architecture, and taught at Powel Elementary in Powelton Village, where his daughter was a student.
Teachers at Powel remembered how he set up a tent in a classroom, explaining that the spokes created the structure, his wife said. He had the children sit in the tent and experience being "within a space."
When his daughter enrolled in Masterman in the late 1980s, he volunteered there. He continued to teach architecture in an enrichment program at Masterman until he became ill last year, his wife said. He would have the students create a personal space with attention to sound, smell, and touch, she said. Outdoors, he led the students on tours of buildings, asking: "How does a building meet the ground? Meet the sky? Turn a corner? Welcome you in?"
Mr. Gavin grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y., and was in the first graduating class of Xaverian High School in Brooklyn. He earned a bachelor's degree from Fordham University in 1965. During his junior year, at the Sorbonne in Paris, he learned to speak fluent French and became interested in architecture, visiting cathedrals.
From 1965 to 1967, he served in the Army in Germany.
After his discharge, he attended Pratt Institute in New York City and then earned a master's degree in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972.
