A View from the High Commissioner's Residence / מבט מארמון הנציב: נוף ירושלים בראי האדריכלות המנדטורית

The residence of the British High Commissioner in Jerusalem, the seat of British authority in Mandatory Palestine, commanded a sublime view over Jerusalem. The prospect from the hill south of the intramural city and the Kedron Valley was more than visually impressive. The view offered from the building (dedicated 1931) of such places as the Haram, the Holy Sepulcher, the synagogues of the Jewish Quarter, Gethsemane, the Siloam Village—and beyond, of Mount of Olives and Mount Scopus, the Judean Desert—was charged with religious connotations and fateful historical memories. The design of a building facing such a sublime and charged landscape required a measure of poetic sensitivity, but the challenge it posed to the architect was more than aesthetic: the sight-line that led from the windows of the residence to the townscape of Jerusalem was a line that led from the seat of British authority toward the territory it ruled. The architectural response to this landscape inevitably became a statement of a point of view, an expression of the way the British masters of the country conceived of its nature and of their role within it. The paternalistic position of Britain in Palestine—the Mandate was, in fact, a form of trusteeship—invited, as it did in other colonial possessions, regionalistic architecture, i.e. architecture that celebrated the local environment. Therefore, the architect, Austen St. Barbe Harrison (1892—1976), designed the building as a subtle portrait of Jerusalem, a reflection of the actual city (and of Palestine) as conceived from a British point of view. In his idealized depiction of Palestine he tried to resolve, through aesthetic means, the contradictions inherent in British construction of Palestinian identity. This paper tries to follow the statement subtly encoded in the architectural design of the building on the landscape of the country it commands.