About the Wallenberg Studios: Raoul Wallenberg, a 1935 architecture graduate of the University of Michigan, has been called one of the 20th century’s most outstanding humanitarian heroes for his work in saving over 100,000 Jews from death during the last days of the Holocaust. A citizen of Sweden, as a young man he traveled to and around the United States to obtain his formal college education and to experience a culture that, as his grandfather Gustaf Wallenberg saw it, would allow him to become “a citizen of the world.” He continued his informal studies after graduation working in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. The Wallenberg Studio honors the legacy of one of our College’s most important alumni through an overall studio theme focused on a broad humanitarian concern, explored through propositions put forward by studio section faculty. Each year we ask: what is architecture’s relationship to the humanitarian; how does architecture take up a position in the world? In 2015 — through the framework of “Participation”— we explore how architectural interventions may participate in larger projects of social change, political activism, or cultural reform and how these propositions of the early twenty-first century might participate in the history of architecture’s disciplinary projects. Through architecture we are able to ask questions of the immediate physical present and the long history that created it.