Edward W. (“Terry”) Waugh (January 23, 1913-February 24, 1966), born in South Africa, was an architect, city and campus planner, and educator who served as a member of the original architecture faculty at the newly founded School of Design (now College of Design) at present North Carolina State University. Through his teaching and his practice he had a substantial influence on the development of modernist architecture in North Carolina and beyond.

Edward Waugh was born in Johannesburg, South Africa to Elizabeth Creighton Luckie, a Scot, and Edward Henry Waugh, an Australian-born architect. He completed his professional studies at the School of Architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art and the Hariot Watt College of Engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1938. After practicing architecture briefly with his father, he served in the South African military before leaving for health reasons in 1940.

Waugh immigrated to the United States in December 1941. He worked for a few years as a structural designer, an aircraft layout engineer, and as stated in his C. V., was “Senior Designer of Motion Picture Sets, Columbia Pictures Corporation, Hollywood.” In 1944 he began post-graduate studies at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan. There he studied architecture and city planning under Eliel Saarinen and met the young architect George Matsumoto, and the two men forged an important and lasting connection. Working in the architectural and planning firm of Saarinen and Swanson, Waugh and Matsumoto both continued their association with Saarinen after leaving Cranbrook. During this time, Waugh along with Matsumoto and David Greer won the $10,000 “Better Chicago” prize in the Chicago Herald American regional planning competition in December 1945.

Waugh’s association with Matsumoto continued in Kansas City, Missouri, from 1946 to 1947 as partners in the architectural firm of Runnels, Clark, Waugh, and Matsumoto. His career as an educator began in Kansas at the University of Kansas in 1947, and he went on to teach at the University of Oklahoma in 1948, again as a colleague of Matsumoto. There he met and married journalist Elizabeth Giles. His arrival at Oklahoma was timely, for this was the year Henry Kamphoefner left the University of Oklahoma to become founding dean of the new School of Design (now College of Design) at present North Carolina State University. Waugh and Matsumoto moved with him to join the modernist faculty Kamphoefner was assembling.

The move to North Carolina was a defining point in Waugh’s career. It brought a promotion from assistant professor—his position at Kansas and Oklahoma—to associate professor, and as a member of the original faculty at the School of Design, Waugh participated in exciting and important developments in the architectural history of the state and associated with the leaders of the modernist philosophy the School embodied. He was generally known as “Terry” Waugh.

In 1951, Waugh left the School of Design to devote more time to private practice in Raleigh. His first effort as a full-time practicing architect in North Carolina came in the form of a partnership with architect Edward Loewenstein of Greensboro, another influential modernist with a large private practice. The partnership was difficult to sustain with the two principals in different cities, and by 1952 Waugh had established his practice as the head of Edward Waugh Associates. Waugh’s first major project after ending his partnership with Loewenstein was the Memorial Coliseum in Winston-Salem, completed in association with G. Milton Small, a leading modernist architect headquartered in Raleigh. The roof economically spanned 210 feet with segmented steel arches, the thrust of which was counteracted by steel tension members. Waugh and Small consulted with Lionel Levy, the designer of Madison Square Garden, to develop an efficient plan of emergency egress for a capacity crowd of ten thousand. A quite different commission for Waugh’s office was the renovation of the Old Highway Building in Raleigh to convert it to the North Carolina Museum of Art. The project, which involved controversies between the architect and the client, was completed in 1955. (The museum eventually moved to new quarters west of Raleigh, and the Old Highway building was returned to office use). At about the same time, Waugh designed a maintenance hangar and office building for Piedmont Airlines in Winston-Salem, which was built in 1956; its location and status are unknown.

During the 1950s, especially, Waugh designed several modernist residences for clients chiefly in Raleigh and Chapel Hill. Well represented on the website ncmodernist.org, these are generally low-profile, 1-story brick, stone, and wood dwellings with extensive use of glass and informal massing and plans, fitted into their naturalistic suburban settings. Representative of these is the William and Bea Fleming House in Chapel Hill (1952), which has been carefully renovated; the landscape was designed by noted landscape architect Lewis Clarke.

Waugh devoted substantial efforts to designs for educational facilities and conducted extensive research on the topic at a time when discussion of educational environments was widespread and modernist architects involved themselves in new school designs. His work encompassed projects from elementary schools to universities and from individual classroom buildings to campus master plans. His research in this area went beyond architectural design alone: he was also concerned with the function of a campus and saw the built environment as playing a key role in the educational process.

Waugh also participated in master planning for several universities and schools around the country. His campus planning activities in North Carolina included work for North Carolina State University 1948 and 1957 and for the present University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1950 and 1959-1960. He designed a number of modernist public schools, often with separate, one-story buildings composing a complex, such as the Frances Lacy School (1953) in Raleigh.

The best-known example of Waugh’s applied research is Harrelson Hall, completed in 1961 on the North Carolina State University campus in Raleigh. The project came at a time when the university was growing rapidly and had a pressing need for more classrooms and offices. The building was the first round (cylindrical) college structure in the United States. Waugh had studied the functional needs of the faculty and their courses; the round building, with faculty offices surrounding trapezoidal shaped classrooms, seems to be an application of Waugh’s theory of campus design. He wrote in The South Builds (1960) that Harrelson Hall represented “a new type of building design in the relation to its total environment. . . . The idea behind these designs is to use the senior faculty to lecture to large groups of students in the circular building, while the junior faculty uses the small classrooms of the square building for group meetings of the same classes.” A student project from a studio course he taught in the late 1960s contains a detailed site analysis and projections of the numbers of students, faculty, and supporting equipment to be accommodated. Theoretical papers written by Waugh during this period contain dynamic analytical drawings of educational processes resembling the form of Harrelson Hall. When the building was completed, it doubled the amount of classroom space at the university and attracted widespread commentary. Its innovative form and plan also presented logistical problems of circulation, lighting, and sight lines in classrooms. Harrelson Hall was razed in 2016-2017.

Although Waugh returned to the School of Design in 1958, another campus planning project captured his attention: from 1962 to 1964 he worked on a master plan for the Universidad Agraria in Peru, a project directed by the North Carolina State Agricultural Mission to Peru. In 1965 he resigned from teaching to continue oversight of the project in Peru.

Meanwhile, in 1960, Edward and his wife, Elizabeth Culbertson Waugh, published a book entitled The South Builds: New Architecture in the Old South. A broad survey of modernist architecture in the South, the volume contains photographic documentation and brief commentaries about important works by Waugh’s colleagues at the School of Design and other modernist figures, including Henry Kamphoefner, Matthew Nowicki, Matsumoto, and James W. Fitzgibbon, as well as A. G. Odell, Jr. and Eduardo Catalano. Elizabeth Waugh became a writer of considerable stature, known especially for her book, North Carolina’s Capital, Raleigh (1967), a milestone in Raleigh’s nascent preservation movement, which called attention to the city’s historic buildings and also featured recent modernist work. The volume did much to set the agenda for preservationists in Raleigh and Wake County.

Edward Waugh died in the prime of his career, of a cerebral hemorrhage, at the age of 54. He was survived by Elizabeth and their daughter, Stella Elizabeth. (See https://usmodernist.org/AIANC/1966-03.pdf). Unfortunately, in common with a number of leading mid-century modernist architects who made notable contributions in North Carolina (and elsewhere), many of Waugh’s signature works have been destroyed in recent decades. A number of his residences, however, have been carefully maintained or restored, as featured in { https://www.ncmodernist.org/waugh.htm }. The building list includes selected surviving examples of Waugh’s residential architecture as represented by the NCMODERNIST website { https://www.ncmodernist.org/waugh.htm }. Additional examples, including those no longer standing, may be viewed on that website.

Henry L. Kamphoefner, “Preface,” in Edward Waugh and Elizabeth Waugh, The South Buildings: New Architecture in the Old South (1960).

Edward Waugh and Elizabeth Waugh, The South Builds: New Architecture in the Old South (1960).

Edward W. Waugh Papers, Private Collections, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh. Mf. P. 186.

Elizabeth Culbertson Waugh, North Carolina’s Capital, Raleigh (1967).

“Edward Walter ‘Terry’ Waugh” in NCMODERNIST website at https://ncmodernist.org/waugh.htm