Representing Mandatory Palestine: Austen St Barbe Harrison and the Representational Buildings of the British Mandate in Palestine, 1922–37

The City of Jerusalem, precious as an emblem of several faiths, a site of spiritual beauty lovingly preserved over the ages by many men’s hands, has been in our care as a sacred trust for 30 years. In these pages will be found an important part of the story of the discharge of that trust, of the efforts made to conserve the old while adding the new in keeping with it, of the process of marrying modern progress with treasured antiquity. Sir Alan Cunningham, High Commissioner for Palestine 1945–48, 1948. The construction of New Delhi is often presented as the peak of British colonial architecture, a monumental undertaking that was nevertheless the Empire’s swansong. Although the city was dedicated only half a generation before the Raj was terminated and the whole Empire set out down the road of decolonization, New Delhi was not the last and final chapter in the history of British colonial architecture. The buildings erected by the British Mandatory government of Palestine — first and foremost, the British High Commissioner’s Residence (completed 1931) and the Palestine Archaeological Museum in Jerusalem (dedicated 1937 and now called the Rockefeller Museum) — were architectural achievements of considerable merit, and, more importantly, they carried further the architectural discourse of New Delhi with commanding sophistication. It was, perhaps, in Palestine that the Empire produced its last intellectually ambitious architectural statement.