Till We Have Built Jerusalem
Architects of a New City
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A biographical excavation of one of the world’s great, troubled cities
A remarkable view of one of the world’s most beloved and troubled cities, Adina Hoffman’s Till We Have Built Jerusalem is a gripping and intimate journey into the very different lives of three architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem.
The book unfolds as an excavation. It opens with the 1934 arrival in Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestine’s chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, this “most private of public servants” finds himself working under the often stifling and violent conditions of British rule. And in the riveting final section, Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of today’s Jerusalem searching for traces of a possibly Greek, possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once a fixture on the local scene, Houris is now utterly forgotten, though his grand Armenian-tile-clad buildings still stand, a ghostly testimony to the cultural fluidity that has historically characterized Jerusalem at its best.
A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers the ramifying layers of one great city’s buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Buildings from a crucial era in modern Palestinian history evoke lost possibilities of cultural unity and harmony, in this scintillating study of politicized architecture. Hoffman (House of Windows) profiles three architects working in Palestine under British rule from 1918 to 1948: Erich Mendelsohn, a celebrated refugee from Nazi Germany; Austen St. Barbe Harrison, an ex-pat British civil servant; and the all-but-forgotten Spyro Houris, designer of elegant Jerusalem houses, whose obscure life reveals the multicultural world of Greek Orthodox Arabs. Hoffman's lively portraits feature the usual melodrama between visionary architects and philistine, penny-pinching funders, heightened by the turmoil of a Palestine rife with violence between Arabs and Jews, shadows of war and exile, and demands that Jewish architects use only Jewish workers and suppliers. She sets their stories against the backdrop of present-day Jerusalem, which she pungently portrays as tacky, squalid, and wracked by religious hatred. Sadly, her subjects' graceful building are often disfigured by menacing security barriers. Hoffman's sensitive architectural appreciations show how these architects blended European Modernist styles with Ottoman and Arab motifs in a Utopian impulse towards an inclusive, cosmopolitan society. The result is both vivid architectural criticism and an illuminating meditation on why Jerusalem's divisions now seem intractable. B&w illus.
