by Jonathan McGaha | December 2, 2015 12:00 am
The Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects[1] (AIA) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture[2] (ACSA) named Douglas S. Kelbaugh, FAIA Emeritus, as the 2016 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion recipient. Kelbaugh is the quintessential teaching architect who has, over the course of four decades, 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. The AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion honors an individual who has been intensely involved in architecture education for more than a decade and whose teaching has influenced a broad range of students.
Kelbaugh began to influence architects in the earliest days of his career after completing his masters of architecture degree at Princeton University. In 1975, he completed a solar house there. The home quickly became an icon of energy-efficient architecture in an era of spiking oil prices. Four decades later, “it is among the most studied and cited passive solar projects in the world,” according to Harrison Fraker, Assoc. AIA, the dean emeritus at University of California at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design.
What followed was a spate of passive solar projects whose success led to Kelbaugh being tapped in 1985 to chair the department of architecture at the University of Washington. There, his scope expanded out from the environmental impact of individual buildings to the role of cities in energy depletion, and sharpened the focus of his colleagues on urban issues. One Kelbaugh-sponsored charrette was published as The Pedestrian Pocket Book, a leading-edge exploration of the value of high-density pedestrian-friendly, transit-oriented development that many architecture schools absorbed into their curricula.
Kelbaugh carried his model for an urban design charrette with him to the University of Michigan in 1998, when he became dean and professor of architecture and urban planning at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The charrettes undertaken there explored the potential for transforming Detroit. At the same time, Kelbaugh set about to transform the school, whose enrollment and financial endowment grew, as well as the diversity of its faculty members. Kelbaugh also shrank the ratio of faculty to students, leading to a more hands-on, intimate educational setting.
During his ten years at Taubman, he continued to write prolifically. After leaving his academic post, Kelbaugh practiced for two years in Dubai as the executive director of design and planning for Limitless LLC, a real estate development firm with mixed-use transit-oriented projects on several continents.
Now teaching again at Taubman, Kelbaugh also writes about environmental urbanism, sustainability and related issues, and has completed no fewer than six book chapters in the past three years. Students in his university-wide lecture course recently nominated him for the University of Michigan’s highest teaching award, describing him as an “inspiring personality, great orator, and teacher.”
The Board of Directors of the AIA selected R. Steven Lewis, AIA, to receive the 2016 Whitney M. Young Jr. Award. Lewis has been a tireless advocate for social justice and diversity within architecture, where less than two percent of the nation’s licensed architects are black.
As the son of an architect who practiced during the Civil Rights era, Lewis saw early in life the unique challenges that faced black architects attempting to work in what he described as a “white gentlemen’s profession.” Now an associate vice-president of TRC Energy Services, he co-founded and headed Los Angeles based RAW International in 1984, he has served as president of the National Organization of Minority Architects (and edited its magazine, where he published profiles of the work of pioneering architects of color), and he played a key role in forging a partnership between NOMA and AIA.
In 2006, while a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Lewis explored the structural inequality that serves to keep the number of practicing architects of color so low. At the end of his fellowship, he convened a symposium on the issue, entitled “Forced Perspective: Widening the Lens Through Which Architecture Views Itself.” The symposium bridged Lewis’ career of advocacy with an urgent question for architecture’s future: what existing attitudes and practices need to change in order to create equity within the profession.
His decades of work on behalf of minority architects, both present and past, has been a tribute to the people he saw while trailing his father as a child. His work on their behalf has been fruitful, wrote Marshall E. Purnell, FAIA, a founding partner of the firm Devrouax+Purnell Architects-Planners. “Steve enlightened a generation of architects on the importance of knowing the history of those who came before them. He built bridges that they crossed,” Purnell wrote in support of Lewis’s nomination for the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award. “He has mentored minority architects through his brilliant leadership by example.”
Established in 1972, the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award has honored architects and organizations that embody the profession’s proactive social mandate through a range of commitments, including affordable housing, inclusiveness, and universal access. The award is named after the civil rights-era head of the Urban League who confronted-head-on-the AIA’s absence of socially progressive advocacy at the 1968 AIA National Convention.
The Board of Directors of the AIA bestowed the Edward C. Kemper Award on Terrance J. Brown, FAIA, for putting his architectural and leadership skills to work helping people be safe, recover and rebuild. Named in honor of the AIA’s first executive director, the award is given annually to an architect who has contributed significantly to the profession through service to the AIA. Over the course of many catastrophes in four decades, Brown has personally trained more than 1,000 U.S. and Canadian architects in ways to mitigate and recover from earthquakes, tornadoes, terrorist attacks and other disasters.
After the 9/11 attacks, Brown’s expertise in disaster-related work was instrumental in developing programs that specifically prepare architects for work in disaster preparedness and recovery. While serving as AIA National Vice President, Brown was “thrust into action in the wake of the attacks that horrifically re-envisioned architecture and the built environment,” wrote Florida architect Michael D. Lingerfelt, FAIA, a former chair of the AIA Disaster Assistance Committee, in endorsing Brown’s nomination. Brown, he wrote, “led the disaster assistance team in determining how architects could best help a shattered and horrified city and nation.”
These efforts culminated in 2005, when he led an initiative to add emergency response training to the profession’s previous focus on relief and recovery. This included disaster response programs, training and credentialing for architects on disaster assistance, and an outreach program that helps governments and citizens understand the pivotal role architects can perform after a catastrophe.
His hands-on work continued with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the devastating earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Japan in 2011, Colorado wildfires in 2012 and floods in 2013. In April 2015, materials that he and others on AIA’s Disaster Committee were made available online to Nepalese and Asian architecture associations.
Upon graduating from Texas Tech University’s architecture program in 1969, Brown was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the Army Engineers and served in Vietnam, flying daily helicopter missions. He was awarded the Bronze Star and other honors during his service, and chronicled daily life in an illustrated war journal that he wrote and drew. In 1976, Brown was in Guatemala when a devastating earthquake hit. While helping care for survivors in the Department of Sacatepequez hospital, he and others learned the building was in danger of collapsing from aftershocks, so Brown, volunteered to set up a field hospital in a soccer field to house hundreds of the injured.
Source URL: https://www.metalarchitecture.com/news/industry-news/aia-announces-2016-aiaacsa-topaz-medallion-whitney-m-young-jr-award-and-kemper-award-winners/
Copyright ©2026 Metal Architecture unless otherwise noted.