Till We Have Built Jerusalem Architects of a New City [Paperback]

A biographical excavation of one of the worlds great, troubled cities

A remarkable view of one of the worlds most beloved and troubled cities, Adina HoffmansTill We Have Built Jerusalemis 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 Hitlers Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, Palestines 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 todays 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 Jerusalemuncovers the ramifying layers of one great citys buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.