News-Record.com

Several hundred people sat in the dark in UNCG's Cone Ballroom Thursday night to see slides and hear speakers extol the talent and genius of late Greensboro architect Ed Loewenstein.

Dabney Sanders, who does work for Action Greensboro and who discovered Loewenstein's designs when she moved here six years ago, said she wondered why his name was heard so little in the community.

She set about to correct that with "The Loewenstein Legacy," a symposium open to the public that will continue this morning. From 1 to 4 p.m. today, eight Loewenstein designed homes will open for tours, and again from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday. An admission fee will be charged.

The symposium and tour are sponsored by Weatherspoon Art Museum, UNCG's Department of Interior Architecture and financed with contributions from many, including Dick and Jane Levy. Jane Levy is Loewenstein's daughter.

"Modernism came to Greensboro kicking and screaming," she told the symposium, relating that her father moved here in 1945 after a marrying Frances Stern of Greensboro.

Loewenstein, a MIT grad, practiced architecture before WWII in Chicago, where he was influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and the Bahaus movement of modern architecture founded by Walter Gropius and other German architects who immigrated to America to excape the Nazis.

Loewenstein's firm, Loewenstein & Atkinson, stayed busy in Greensboro from the time it was formed in 1948 until Loewenstein's death in 1970 (at age 57) from a heart attack.

Yet during his time, many in Greensboro poked fun of his modernist style. The city's love of neo-Georgian, Tudor revival, Southern colonial and ranch-style architecture was tough to crack.

To keep the firm busy, Loewenstein also designed traditional homes and buildings, such as the neo-Georgian president's home on the Bennett College campus.

But his heart was in modernism.

It wasn't brought out in symposium, but the Loewenstein firm worked hard to be named architects of the Greensboro-Guilford County Government Center, built in the late 1960s.

As he often did with projects, Loewenstein collaborated with others - in this case, William Freeman & Associates, an architectural, engineering and planning firm in High Point. They bid a complete package, even designing the utilities, the sewer system, the landscaping and other details.

The city and county, however, chose another modernist architect: Edwardo Catalano of Cambridge, Mass. He designed two square concrete structures. In the summer issue of Landmarks, published by Preservation Greensboro Inc., PGI Executive Director Benjamin Briggs identifies the center as the "Brutalist" style of modernist architect.

The two buildings have never caught on with some in Greensboro. One wonders what might have been had Loewenstein, who designed the old library building a block away that's being converted for the new Elon University law school, had done the design.

Catalano's name arose during the symposium. The Argentine native taught at N.C. State University's School of Design in the 1950s before moving to MIT.

Richard Longstreth, professor of American Civilization at George Washington University, showed two slides of the modernist house Catalano built for himself in Raleigh. One shows the house new; the other as it appears now, in near collapse.

Longstreth said too many modernist strutures and whimsical buildings of the 1950s and 1960s are disappearing. The style defined the times and can't be duplicated, especially the houses, which often required large lots that would be too expensive today.

Longstreth says many ask how any house or building can be historic if they can remember when it was built.

"We can't be snobbish about these things," he said. "They represent an important development in American housing."

He said it's foolish to believe the recent past doesn't deserve the same attention as the distant past.

Dabney Sanders should feel better. Greensboro seems finally appreciative of Loewenstein. The univeristy's Department of Interior Architecture has created a scholarship in his name.

And the symposium and homes tour may be the first in North Carolina about post-war modernist architecture.

Nancy Doll, director of Weatherspoon Art Museum, said, "I've never worked on a project that resonated with so many people."