Michael Benedikt

• Price: $11.50
• Paperback—72 pages (2000)
• ISBN: 1-891197-14-2
• Dimensions: 6.5" x 9"
• © 2000 The University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Michael Benedikt

Editor: Annette W. LeCuyer

Design: Speranza Octavia

Sample Selection

It is a special honor for me to give the Wallenberg Lecture at the University of Michigan. I grew up the only child of two survivors, and this made knowing something of the Holocaust's unimaginable cruelty very much a part of my life. My parents' eyewitness accounts to me of that period, though infrequent, as well as their own suffering-in-memory, set a certain heaviness into my otherwise idyllic youth—a sadness I could not speak of; an indignation my peers did not feel. My parents' stories inspired a sense of mission in me too, a much larger one than they intended me to have. I wondered: Could I, with my life, somehow make up for the loss of all those Jewish lives? Or, if not make up for them exactly, for this mission would be absurd, then at least achieve something that would make their ghosts proud? Could I make the world a better place, one where a civilized people could not, would not, turn on their own again?

At eighteen, and in college, architecture for me could not be just an aesthetic pursuit, nor an economic or social one. Architecture had to be a moral pursuit, a search for goodness in beauty and beauty in goodness, with truth the royal road. The glory and comfort of buildings had to be One Thing, fine beyond measure, and everlasting.

And so, with me, it remains.

I knew about Raoul Wallenberg only in the most cursory way before preparing for this lecture. World War II hero, savior and shelterer of Jews, a gentile who lost - or perhaps gave - his lift in the effort. This much I knew. My surprise at learning that Wallenberg was also an architect, and that he had studied at the University of Michigan, cannot be exaggerated. The question that occurred to me as supremely worth exploring was this: Given what Wallenberg did in German-occupied Hungary fifty-six years ago, and how he did it, does it matter now did it matter then - that he was trained as an architect?

I think that it does matter, and did, and in this talk I'm going to try to explain why. Indeed, I think what Wallenberg did with his architectural training (he never really practiced) can challenge is to think about architecture in a different way. The connecting thread is the idea of shelter; and she1ter, if you think about it, is something provided by both architecture and law.