Douglas Kelbaugh

Douglas S. Kelbaugh, FAIA, is a professor emeritus of architecture and urban and regional planning and former dean at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. His 1975 passive solar house in Princeton was the first to utilize a Trombe Wall, and is one of his many pioneering and award-winning passive solar buildings designed by his firm Kelbaugh and Lee. He later moved his practice to Seattle, where he was architecture chair at the University of Washington. He partnered with Peter Calthorpe, another co-founder of the passive solar and New Urbanism movements.

Kelbaugh has served as a faculty member or visitor at nine schools of architecture in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Australia. One of the first to popularize the modern design charrette, he has organized and participated as a team leader in more than 30 of these community design workshops in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. After his 10-year deanship, from 2008 to 2010, he served as executive director of design and planning for a Dubai-based development company with a portfolio of large sustainable projects in Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Kelbaugh has co-chaired many national and international conferences on energy, urbanism, and design, spoken to hundreds of professional and community groups, and written countless articles on sustainable design. In 1989, he edited The Pedestrian Pocket Book (Princeton Architectural Press, a national bestseller in urban design that first introduced the concept of TOD (Transit-Oriented-Development). In 1997, Kelbaugh authored Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design, a book on urban theory, design, and policy, followed by its sequel, Repairing the American Metropolis in 2002. In addition to writing more than a dozen book chapters, he was the editor of The Michigan Debates on Urbanism: Everyday, New, and Post in 2005 and the co-editor of Writing Urbanism in 2008.

Kelbaugh was awarded the 2016 Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education from the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the highest award given to an educator by the two organizations. The national award cited his career for bridging architecture, sustainability, and the city. Kelbaugh’s most recent book is THE URBAN FIX: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Heat Islands, and Overpopulation (2019), which he wrote on sabbatical at Cambridge University. 

He received his Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, and Master of Architecture from Princeton University.