BEAUTIFUL THINGS ARE DIFFICULT

1 R B E A U T I F U L T H I N G S A R E D I F F I C U L T A D I N A H O F F M A N In the summer of 1922, thirty-one-year-old Austen St. Barbe Harrison arrived in Jerusalem to take up the position of chief architect to British Mandatory Palestine’s Public Works Department. A refined and reclusive lifelong expatriate who had left England for the East as a young man and whose extensive knowledge of Byzantine and Islamic building informed even his most stately colonial edifices, Harrison would live and work in Palestine for the next fifteen years and eventually come to be viewed as the representative architect of the country’s Mandate period. The mark he left on Jerusalem in particular was major, as his buildings are among the finest ever constructed in the modern city. Their imposing public presence aside, however, Harrison’s creations hold much of their fascination because of the subtle private stamp they bear: from the angular ornamentation of the ventilation slits at Government House, the o≈cial residence he designed for Palestine’s high commissioners, to the two-tone, four-square panels set into the massive wooden double doors at the central post o≈ce on Jerusalem’s main street, Ja√a Road, every detail Harrison conceived was an expression of his keen sense of proportion, his playful historical imagination, and his 2 H O F F M A N Y strong feeling for the spirit of this most vital – and troubled – of places. Later in life, the novelist Lawrence Durrell would dedicate Bitter Lemons, his memoir of the turbulent years he spent in Cyprus, to Harrison, his neighbor and friend there in the 1950s. Durrell would remember the architect as embodying ‘‘that forgotten world where style was not only a literary imperative but an inherent method of approaching the world of books, roses, statues and landscapes.’’ While Harrison himself has been forgotten by most of those who pass through and use his Jerusalem buildings today, each of these structures retains the imprint of his singular sensibility. At the same time he was planning Government House, Harrison nursed an architectural secret – ‘‘a real secret not to be spoken,’’ as he confided in a letter to his mother back in England. It was the start of 1927. Since coming to Palestine, he’d learned all kinds of things that fascinated him – about rubble, twig, and packed-mud vaulting; about the various grades and colors of Jerusalem stone and the di√erent styles of its chiseling; about the madafeh (reception room) and the mastabeh (living space) of the traditional peasant home; about modern art and ancient relics, Armenian tiles and the alternating light and dark masonry stripes known in Arabic as ablaq. He had also learned much more than he would care to know about politics and pettiness and what he referred to as ‘‘propaganda ’’: ‘‘How heartily sick I am of political propaganda vested as aesthetical criticism,’’ he’d write a close friend in a moment of especially pronounced disgust. In this top-secret case he was well aware that ‘‘all kinds of strings will be pulled to prevent me from doing this big job.’’ Ever a master of scale, he had measured the situation correctly. It was a big job, the biggest he’d reckoned with so far. Declaring that ‘‘the past of Palestine is more important to the world than the past of any other country, and there are no monuments more precious than those which reveal to us the past of this land toward which all civilized people turn with reverence,’’ the American philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, Jr., had confidentially pledged two million dollars to build an archaeological museum in Jerusalem . Rockefeller had been persuaded by the highly enterprising B E A U T I F U L T H I N G S A R E D I F F I C U L T 3 R small-town-Illinois-born, Yale-and-Berlin-educated Egyptologist, archaeologist, philologist, and founder (with Rockefeller’s funds) of the Oriental Institute...