biography

Chicago native Edward Loewenstein (1913-1970) moved to Greensboro in 1945 with his wife, Frances Stern, following Army service in World War II. Frances, a native of the Greensboro area and stepdaughter of Julius Cone, local businessman of the textiles magnate family, provided access to a large social network of contacts within and outside of the Jewish community. Through this web of relations and his community engagement, Loewenstein secured design commissions that redefined Greensboro in the post-World War II period. With a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1930-1935), he established a design practice from 1946 to 1952 in Greensboro, and a flourishing partnership that began in 1953 with Robert A. Atkinson, Jr., that continued until Loewenstein’s untimely death in 1970. Loewenstein-Atkinson produced more than 1,600 commissions spanning that time period, one third of them residential. Notably, the firm hired the first African-American architects and design professionals in Greensboro. Loewenstein also mentored hundreds of students in the office as interns and through his teaching at the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina from 1958 through the late 1960s.