Joseph Allen Stein 1912-2001 Stein was born in Omaha, Nebraska and his architectural education began at the University of Illinois in the mid-1930s. He went on to study in France at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Fountainebleau before returning to Illinois to pursue graduate studies. Stein attended the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan as a Fellow in Architecture and City Planning before moving to New York to work for Ely Jacques Kahn. In 1938 he moved to Los Angeles where he worked for Richard Neutra and in association with Gregory Ain before moving to San Francisco to open his own practice following the Second World War. Stein with John Funk, Garrett Eckbo and Robert Royston developed designs for the 1947 Ladera Cooperative in Palo Alto.

In 1952, Stein moved to India where he designed some of India's most important modern buildings, and served as the head of the department of architecture at the Bengal Engineering College in Calcutta. He spent the remainder of his career in India, where he won acclaim for marrying his structures to the natural landscape retiring in 1995.

Stein's best-known Indian projects include buildings on Lodi Estate in New Delhi such as headquarters of the Ford Foundation, Unicef and the World Wide Fund for Nature, a conference center called the India International Center, and the India Habitat Center for housing and environmental studies. Other notable buildings include Triveni Kala Sangam in New Dehli, an Indian arts center with an open-air theater; several factories with roofs inspired by the domes used in traditional Indian architecture; and the Kashmir Conference Center, built against a snowy mountain backdrop near Srinagar. Stein was also a major contributor to three of the four new industrial towns built by India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, in his drive to modernize the country.