Till we have built Jerusalem : architects of a new city Equal parts biographical puzzle architectural meditation and probing detective story Adina Hoffmans Till We Have Built Jerusalem offers a prismatic view into one of the worlds most beloved and troubled cities. Panoramic yet intimate this portrait of three architects who helped build modern Jerusalem is also a gripping exploration of the ways in which politics and aesthetics clash in a place of constant conflict. The book opens with the arrival in 1930s Jerusalem of the celebrated Berlin architect Erich Mendelsohn who as a refugee from Hitlers Germany has to 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 hes forced to work in the often stifling and violent context of British rule. And in the riveting final section Hoffman herself sets out through the battered streets of todays Jerusalem looking for traces of a possibly Greek possibly Arab architect named Spyro Houris. Once renowned around town Houris is now utterly forgotten though his buildings still stand a ghostly testimony to his presence. A beautifully written rumination on memory and forgetting place and displacement Till We Have Built Jerusalem uncovers ramifying levels of one great citys buried history as it asks what it means everywhere to be foreign and to belong A cultural history of Jerusalem under the British Mandate focusing on the tensions between its architecture and its political divisions