Austen Harrison

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Austen Harrison
Rockefeller Museum
ProjectsBuildings of Nuffield College, Oxford

Austen St. Barbe Harrison (1891–1976) was a British-born architect. While British, Harrison spent most of his career overseas, and mainly in the

Rockefeller Museum, Jerusalem, 1935, and Nuffield College, Oxford
.

Biography

Early life and WWI

Harrison was born in Kent in 1891. One of his ancestors was the renowned novelist Jane Austen after whom he was named.[citation needed]

His upper-middle-class family pushed him to pursue a career in the military. After attending Sandhurst, he was commissioned as a

Flanders, Belgium, during the Great War. The horror of what he saw convinced him that he wanted no part of either the military nor the war. When he informed his commanding officer that he intended to resign from the service and return to England, the officer told him that he could be court-martialled for refusing orders and desertion. Undeterred, Harrison replied, "So be it." Harrison's decision created a problem for the officer who apparently knew the young lieutenant's family and did not wish to suffer the indignity of having one of his junior officers court-martialled. Harrison, for his part, had no desire to create a scandal or crusade as a pacifist. He merely wanted no part of killing other human beings. The officer and Harrison eventually reached a compromise: Harrison could resign his commission and serve as stretcher bearer for the remainder of the campaign. Later in life, in recounting his experiences in that ghastly battle, he described how the greatest danger that the stretcher-bearers and medics faced was the ubiquitous mud. The battle was fought largely in swamp land during periods of unusually heavy rainfall. To step off the board walks—which were necessitated by the conditions—while carrying the dead and wounded from the front was to risk literally drowning in mud. At the end of his life, as time past and present merged in his mind, he relived the terror of that experience, confusing those around him with his stretcher-bearing comrades and warning them of the treacherous mud.[citation needed
]

Studies

After the war, he travelled to

University College, London.[1]

Greece

Harrison joined the

Eastern Macedonia after the First World War, where he was appointed Assistant Architect and Town Planner; his tasks included planning Nigrita and other settlements in Greece.[1]

Palestine (1923-37)

Rockefeller Museum
, Jerusalem

His next position (from 1923 onwards) was as Chief Architect to the

British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem.[2]

During his nearly 15 years in Jerusalem, he came to know many of the most famous residents and visitors to Palestine, including

Jewish citizens over resident Arabs and sowed the seeds of escalating conflict into the future. He resigned his position in protest in 1937 and moved to Cyprus, leaving behind Jerusalem, a city that he loved and whose people and culture (their architecture, in particular) had shaped his life.[citation needed
]

England, Egypt, etc.

After a donation to the University of Oxford from Lord Nuffield, Harrison next was appointed as architect for the newly established Nuffield College, Oxford, but the donor rejected his first plans for the college (which were heavily influenced by medieval Mediterranean buildings and traditional Arab design) and refused to allow his name to be associated with them, saying that they were "un-English".[3][4] Harrison modified the design so that the college looked like "something on the lines of Cotswold domestic architecture", as Nuffield wanted.[4] Harrison's rejected design has been described as Oxford's "most notable architectural casualty of the 1930s".[5] Nuffield College seems to have been the only building in Britain that he designed; his other work included the University College of the Gold Coast (today's University of Ghana), and a report (in 1945) on the planning of Valletta, Malta.[1]

Cyprus

While living in Cyprus in the 1950s, Harrison befriended the writer Lawrence Durrell and helped Durrell who was struggling to support his family as a teacher. Durrell's wife was suffering a mental illness and it fell to Durrell to care for his children and his wife. One of the fruits of Durrell's writing is his book about Cyprus, Bitter Lemons, that is dedicated to Harrison.[1]

Athens. Death.

Harrison in Katounia, 1960s photo by Dimitri Papadimos

Harrison subsequently moved to

resistance organisation SPITHA, active during the occupation of Greece by Nazi Germany), and their son Ioannis (Yani)[clarification needed].[6] He died at the Papadimos family home in 1976.[citation needed
]

Archive

Ioannis (Yani) Papadimos, the son of Dimitri Papadimos, one of the main contributors to this article, has written here in July 2010 that "The Papadimos family donated the Austen St. Barbe Harrison archive to the Rockefeller Museum." In a book by

History of Architecture lecturer who wrote his PhD dissertation[8] and further articles on Harrison,[9] writes that Harrison's personal archive was, at least in parts, transferred from Dimitri Papadimos' estate to the IAA, but that the largest part of his personal material from the Palestine period had already been destroyed in Cairo in 1942, all papers of his Oxford-based firm finding the same fate when it closed down in 1968, and Harrison himself burned a great many of his personal papers before his death.[9]

Works

Sderot Yerushalayim
, designed by Austen Harrison in 1931
Government Mint building, Jerusalem

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Colvin, p. 168
  2. ^ Hood, p. 212, 214
  3. ^ Colvin, p. 171
  4. ^ a b Colvin, p. 174
  5. ^ Colvin, p. 166
  6. ^ Ιωάννα Φωκά [Ioanna Phoca]. "Σπίθα - Γυναικεία Αντιστασική Οργάνωση [SPITHA Women's Resistance Organisation]" (in Greek). Ioannis Metaxas website. Retrieved 7 November 2012.
  7. ISBN 9780374709785
    . Retrieved 9 February 2021.
  8. ^ Hoffman (2016), p. 318
  9. ^
    S2CID 195029558
    . Retrieved 9 February 2021.
Bibliography

Further reading

External links

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