More than anything, Wallenberg wanted to be an architect. By choosing Michigan, he was attending one of the premier American programs of its day.

Wallenberg arrived at an exhilarating moment for the Michigan architecture program. Its leader, Professor Emil Lorch, had been at U-M for a quarter-century and was determined to see architecture—then part of the College of Engineering—become an independent school in its own building. Michigan Architecture was one of the largest programs in the country, and it needed to make its mark.

The building came first, in 1928, a four-story brick structure designed by Lorch himself and located at what was then a far corner of campus. Three years later, with the blessing of the Board of Regents, the College of Architecture was born, led by Lorch as its first dean.

This was the environment that awaited Wallenberg. No doubt he appreciated the European flair of the faculty, with architects from Finland, Denmark, Austria and France among the teaching corps. Sketching in the courtyard of Lorch Hall, which was filled with architectural elements, he would have watched as just two city blocks to the west the area was transformed into the magnificent structures of the Law Quadrangle.

He designed restaurants and houses. Challenged to find ways to house thousands inexpensively, he spent 10 weeks devising an entire community, on paper. He was fond of his professors, including his senior thesis adviser, a French architect named Jean Hebrard.

“Working under him has been wonderful, although he’s very European. That is to say, he maintains a certain aloofness, and it would never occur to anyone to address him with anything but the greatest of reverence and respect.

“American professors, on the other hand, without in any way sacrificing their authority, feel embarrassed if you scrape and bow. In American slang it is known as ‘polishing the apple.’ How the expression originated I don’t know.”

Wallenberg was honest in saying he put his time and creativity into architecture at the expense of subjects he disliked, such as chemistry and math (“there is a real disaster brewing”).

“I have been quite lazy when it comes to some of my courses.”

When he graduated in 1935, Wallenberg received the American Institute of Architects silver medal as Michigan’s most outstanding student.

Even so, he was more artist than architect. He covered his room with murals he designed, filling them with animals, birds, ships and buildings drawn in chalky pastels. Friends particularly enjoyed the work because Wallenberg was colorblind.

“Raoul Wallenberg was so apt a student in drawing and painting—I must have had him in three or four classes during his studies with us—that he got nothing but As from, I suppose, all of us. He definitely did from me,” Jean Paul Slusser, a professor of drawing and painting, told an interviewer years later. “I asked him finally if he were not intending to be an artist. He looked at me slowly and, as I think of it now, perhaps a little sadly.

“He then explained to me briefly and with enormous modesty, too, who his family were and how the sons of the house of Wallenberg were educated.”

That meant the world of banking and, as Wallenberg saw it, a career being “a commercial ditto.” After graduating and landing business internships—with the help of his grandfather—in South Africa and Palestine, he remained unsettled about his future. He wrote to Lorch, his former dean, inquiring about the American market for draftsmen; Lorch advised him to work in Europe. And he told his grandfather that he wasn’t suited for the Wallenberg family business.

“To tell you the truth, I don’t find myself very bankerish: the director of a bank should be judgelike and calm and cold and cynical besides. …My temperament is better suited to some positive line of work than to sitting around saying no.”

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