Modernism and the Middle East: Architecture and Politics in the Twentieth Century

1. Jerusalem Remade

In the nineteenth century the Old City of Jerusalem was a rich historical mix: a Roman grid obscured by nearly two millennia of later construction . Monuments to diªerent political hegemonies survived: the Herodian retaining-wall of al-Haram al-Sharif, the Constantinian and Crusader Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Umayyad Dome of the Rock, the Mamluk fountains, all sheltered from a rugged landscape by the great sixteenthcentury walls of Süleyman the Magnificent and set in the sympathetic Ottoman matrix of vernacular domestic and commercial construction in Jerusalemstone.Before1850,Westerntravelers werestillabletoseeJerusalem as the ideal ancient walled city, at least from a distance. The French poet and traveler, Alphonse de Lamartine, described the view of Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives in October 1832: The whole of Jerusalem is stretched before us, like the plan of a town in relief, spread by an artist upon a table. . . . This city is not, as it has been represented,anunshapelyandconfusedmassof ruinsandashes,overwhich a few Arab cottages are thrown, or a few Bedouin tents pitched; neither is it,likeAthens,achaosof dustandcrumblingwalls,wherethetravelerseeks in vain the shadow of edifices, the trace of streets, the phantom of a city;— but it is a city shining in light and color; presenting nobly to view her intact and battlemented walls, her blue mosque with its white colonnades, her thousand resplendent domes, from which the rays of the autumnal sun 39 1 Jerusalem Remade annabel wharton are reflected in a dazzling vapor; the facades of her houses, tinted by time and heat, of the yellow and golden hue of the edifices of Paestum or of Rome; her old towers, the guardians of her walls, to which neither one stone, one loophole, nor one battlement is wanting; and above all, amidst that ocean of houses, that cloud of little domes which cover them, it is a dark elliptical dome, larger than the others, overlooked by another and a whiteone.Thesearethechurchesof theHolySepulchreandof Calvary. . . . The view is the most splendid that can be presented to the eye, of a city that is no more.1 Lamartine’s rapturous image of the city was a literary convention with an equally stereotypical visual counterpart. Western prints and paintings of Jerusalemsimilarlyrendereditasamythicalfortifiedcitysetinanalienwilderness . Many of those renderings, despite claims of authenticity, were utterly fanciful.2 Among the more convincing were those of the Scottish artist David Roberts (fig. 1.1). Roberts’s master work, The Holy Land: Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia, published in London between 1840 and 1845, was one of the most lavish lithographic art-print collections ever manufactured; its images were reproduced in multiple editions, both legal and pirated.3 40 Annabel Wharton fig. 1.1. David Roberts, Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, in The Holy Land: Syria, Idumea, Arabia, Egypt & Nubia, vol. 1, plate 17. This volume is in the collection of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; museum purchase. Jerusalem was transformed during the second half of the nineteenth century . Economic and political stability under the enlightened despot, Muhammad Ali, viceroy and pasha of Egypt (1805–49), as well as increasingly aªordable travel with the extension of railroads and steamship lines, contributed to a revival of pilgrimage and the advent of tourism. Süleyman’s great walls, built in the sixteenth century to protect Jerusalem from an anticipated Christian Crusade, had long separated the city from a hostile hinterland; by the end of the nineteenth century, those walls divided the Old City from its rapidly developing suburbs. The earlier, sublime Jerusalem was, however, the Jerusalem still sought by the city’s Western visitors. High-art representations of the city, like Frederick Edwin Church’s Jerusalem of 1871, as well as popular renderings, like the persuasively illusionistic versions of Jerusalem on the Dayof theCrucifixion displayed in the great panoramas of the end of the nineteenth century, perpetuated notions of Jerusalem as an ancient walled city.4 Images also whetted the Western appetite for the Holy City. The desire for a particular view of Jerusalem might appear benign, but it was part of the drive for a more literal form of possession. European and American travelers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, experiencing the East under control of the Turks, willed Western domination of the old Ottoman Empire. The travel writer Edwin de Leon gave characteristic expression to this sentiment: “The Turcoman came as a scourge from his far wilds, to chastise the vices of an eªete...