Commencement Houses by Loewenstein and Ivy

In 1957, Loewenstein began teaching an innovative course in architectural design at Woman's College. Twenty-three students took the year-long course offered through Gregory Ivy's Department of Art, open to both home economics and art majors. According to Ivy, the design-build studio gave "students a real working knowledge of the problems they would face in making homes for themselves and their families." Students achieved "working knowledge" of design as many opportunities and problems arose, such as a design based on load-bearing construction, material qualities, and, most interestingly, the challenges posed by new, state-of-the-art technology such as dishwashers, garbage disposals, and aluminum wiring, which cut down wiring cost for the project by over twenty percent. In Loewenstein's studio class, the students designed a house, oversaw its construction and decorated the resulting structure, dubbed the "Commencement House" by the university's public relations office.

Acclaim for the structure came from local and national sources. The Greensboro Daily News proclaimed the house "as modern as tomorrow," hailing the women who designed it as pioneers, reporting that "they are the first pupils outside the schools of architecture to attempt the complete designing and building of a house." Mereb Mossman, Dean of Instruction at Woman's College, described the project as "an exciting experience in construction," suggesting that the walls of a college building are no longer the boundary lines for a program of learning." Chancellor Gordon W. Blackwell declared that building the house "marks another national first for the college."

At its May 1958 dedication, an event covered by the paper and broadcast on WUNC-TV, North Carolina First Lady Mrs. Luther Hodges, herself an alumna of Woman's College, cut the ribbon on the house. The transcript of the live remote broadcast suggests that all of the students were involved in ALL aspects of the design from overall planning, site selection and landscaping, public relations and material donations, the design of the interiors, as well as the selection of the furnishings and finishes.

Written up in the November 1958 edition of McCall's Magazine, students divided into committees to research various areas of specialty looking at studies on living and energy patterns. They organized the house around a series of activity centers, planned for specific family needs, and furnished the house in what the students called "warm modern," with an emphasis on interesting textures and a blending of interior and exterior finishing materials. The result of their efforts, according to McCall's: a "real honey of a home."

Southern Appliances Magazine, in September 1958, reported additional information on the ideas behind the class noting that Loewenstein himself "felt that there was a lack of interest in platform lecturing and that the students needed something to spark their interest," visualizing that if they could "design something and see it carried out in the form of an actual home," they would "have a feeling of solid creativeness," an idea they went after "tooth and nail." Loewenstein and the house's contractor, Eugene Gulledge (Superior Contracting Company of Greensboro) placed two restrictions on the students as they designed, the first relating to the number of people to live in the house, and the second to design a house that could sell in Greensboro. According to Gulledge, "while the house should contain pioneering ideas of layout and design, it should not be so radical as to make it unmarketable."