Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects Of A New City

A biographical excavation of one of the worldÆs great, troubled cities A remarkable view of one of the worldÆs most beloved and troubled cities, Adina HoffmanÆs 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 HitlerÆs Germany who must reckon with a complex new Middle Eastern reality. Next we meet Austen St. Barbe Harrison, PalestineÆs chief government architect from 1922 to 1937. Steeped in the traditions of Byzantine and Islamic building, this ômost private of public servantsö 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 todayÆs 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 cityÆs buried history as it asks what it means, everywhere, to be foreign and to belong.

• | Author: Adina Hoffman
• | Publisher: Farrar, Straus And Giroux
• | Publication Date: Apr 11, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 364 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback/Biography & Autobiography
• | ISBN-10: 0374536783
• | ISBN-13: 9780374536787