Douglas Kelbaugh, University of Michigan professor and dean emeritus of architecture and urban planning, has received the 2016 Topaz Medallion from the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

Douglas KelbaughANN ARBOR—Douglas Kelbaugh, University of Michigan professor and dean emeritus of architecture and urban planning, has received the 2016 Topaz Medallion from the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.
This is the highest award given to a North American architecture educator for excellence in architectural education. It is the first time a U-M faculty member has been awarded the honor.

The AIA/ACSA recognized Kelbaugh as “the quintessential teaching architect who, over the course of four decades, has achieved estimable success in teaching, practice and writing, which he has ably woven together to shape a generation’s thinking about the environmental aspects of architecture. He has bridged architecture, urban design and sustainability in practice, academic dialogue and the classroom as much as any academician in his generation.”

Sustainable design and planning, transit-oriented development and social justice have been foundational throughout Kelbaugh’s academic career. His practice and research in passive solar buildings was broadly influential. His Trombe wall house in Princeton, N.J., featured in some 100 books, periodicals and exhibitions, is among the most famous exemplars of the era. The house used a large, south-facing glass and concrete wall to collect, store and radiate heat to the interior.

Kelbaugh came to U-M in 1998 as the dean and professor of architecture and urban planning. Shortly thereafter, the college received a gift of $30 million from A. Alfred Taubman, the largest gift to a school of architecture and planning, and the school was renamed the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. This gift allowed the college to increase its faculty-to-student ratio, student financial aid, new initiatives and facility upgrades, as well as the national ranking of its primary degree program, which was as high as No. 3 during his deanship.

Kelbaugh’s pedagogic impact has been as much through the three dozen design charrettes and conferences that he organized, and his countless publications, guest lectures and writings as through his teaching and mentoring.

He has delivered lectures at more than 60 architecture schools in the U.S. and abroad, and has been a visiting professor at four U.S. universities, as well as in Copenhagen, Denmark Tokyo, Sydney and Lund, Sweden.

Kelbaugh completed his bachelor’s degree (Magna Cum Laude) and Master of Architecture degree at Princeton University. Between his undergraduate and graduate degrees, he was a VISTA volunteer for two years where he co-founded a community design center in an inner-city neighborhood in Trenton, N.J. While teaching part-time at N.J.I.T., he founded his first architecture firm in Princeton in 1977, which won 15 design awards and competitions. In 1988, he became the architecture department chair at the University of Washington, and invigorated that program, while his firm Kelbaugh, Calthorpe Associates won several more design awards and competitions.

In addition to authoring and editing a half dozen books and more than a dozen book chapters, he is an engaged faculty member, teaching graduate architecture, urban design and sustainability courses at U-M. His course, “Architecture, Sustainability and the City,” is one of the most popular and the largest elective course offered by the college.

Kelbaugh shares the Topaz Medallion honor with two U-M architecture alumni: Ralph Rapson (1987) and Charles Willard Moore (1989).

More information:

• Complete list of Topaz Medallion recipients