He won the Chicago Herald American International City Plan Competition Grand Prize in 1945, at which point he was partners with George Matsumoto and David Greer.
[4][5] Kamphoefner and those he brought with him to the new School of Design were heavily influenced by Modernist architecture and their work helped bring North Carolina into the mainstream of the movement.
[6] The school brought in internationally renowned architects as Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis I. Kahn, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Pier Luigi Nervi, and Charles Eames to lecture and experiment.
[7] Established in Raleigh, North Carolina, Waugh and the other modernist architects built industrial, residential, commercial, ecclesiastical, governmental, and educational buildings.
In 1952, he opened his own firm, Edward Waugh Associates and continued to operate it when he became campus planner for North Carolina State University in 1957.