The University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning presents the lecture “Honest, Elegant and Appropriate +/- 50 years” by Douglas Kelbaugh, Taubman College professor of architecture and dean emeritus.

Kelbaugh is the recipient of the 2016 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, the highest national award in the field. The lecture is at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 26, in the Stamps Auditorium at the Walgreen Drama Center. A reception will take place at 6 p.m. in the lobby outside Stamps Auditorium.

This is the 42nd year of the award, and the first time a U-M faculty member has won the honor. Kelbaugh was recognized 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 was one of the first to popularize the contemporary urban design charrette. Kelbaugh has been a faculty member or visiting professor at eight schools of architecture in the USA, Europe, Japan and Australia. He started the urban design program and a real estate development program at U-M, and a community design center in Detroit.

Kelbaugh’s writings include “Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design.” It is a book on the theory, design and practice of regionalism, published by the University of Washington Press in 1997 and now in its second printing. In 2007, he was selected as one of the top seven Architecture Educators of the Year.