News-Record.com

Memories of the man some consider Greensboro's most innovative architect are being kept alive by his friends, admirers and daughter, Jane Levy.

As a result of a symposium last November on Edward Loewenstein and money raised from donations and a public tour of eight modernistic houses he designed, $10,000 went toward establishing a graduate scholarship in his name at UNCG.

"We anticipate that over the long term this will grow to truly be yet another legacy of Loewenstein," Dabney Sanders, a consultant on the tour and symposium, says in an email.

But much more money is needed. The scholoarship needs an endowment of $50,000 to draw sufficient income from.

Sanders says she and Jane Levy will attempt to raise $20,000 of the needed money through a raffle. The winner will get a five course dinner, with a generous wine selection, for 12 people.

The dinner will be held on the lawn of Jane Levy's house, which was designed and lived in by her father until his death in 1970. The house is at Granville Road and West Cornwallis Drive.

The exact spot will be around the Nancy Rubins Airplane sculpture that Jane Levy and her husband, Richard Levy, bought last year for their front yard. Rubins, a California sculptor, creates works using parts from discarded airplane parts.

Tickets for the raffle cost $100, and only 200 will be sold, with the deadline for buying June 20. Sanders said some groups are pooling their money and buying one ticket as a group.

The date for the dinner hasn't been set, "but the it will be held at a time mutually agreed upon by the winner and the committee," Sanders says.

The affair is being called "An Artful Feast Under the Stars." Postcards sent to potential ticket buyers advertise "great odds, great chefs, great cause."

The scholarship will go to a student in the graduate interior architect program at UNCG. Loewenstein, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stayed busy designing modernist homes and buildings in Greensboro and elsewhere but found time to teach a course at UNCG.

Not everyone was a fan of the man's modern designs. At least three home he designed in Irving Park have been demolished.But many remain and their owners swear by them, not at them.

During a stretch from 1961 to 1965, Loewenstein's staff included Gregory Ivy, who founded the art department at UNCG in 1935> After a dispute with the univeristy over space for the art department, Ivy left to join Loewenstein.

Ivy, a painter who is considered the father of modernistic style art in North Carolina, did interior and exterior work for the Loewenstein firm.

Ironically, the firm operated not from some out-of-this-world creation, but an old-style Georgia mansion that still survives off Summit Avenue. The remnants of the Loewenstein firm, Wilson Engineering, remain in the house.

The house,where Eleanor Roosevelt once stayed, originally belonged to Julius Cone. Jane Levy's grandmother was Julius Cone's wife.

One Loewestine and Ivy colloborations will soon become one of downtown's most important buildings again: the new Elon University School of Law.

Loewenstein designed the building as the main Greensboro Public Library in 1964. Ivy did the artistic reliefs that remain on the walls outside the entrance at North Greene Street and West Friendly Avenue.

For further imformation about the raffle, telephone Dabney Sanders at 379-0821 or email her at dsanders@actiongreeensboro.org or www.actiongreensboro.org