Austen Harrison
Austen St. Barbe Harrison (1891–1976) was a British-born architect. While British, Harrison spent most of his career overseas, and mainly in the Middle East. His works include the British Representative's Residence, Amman, the High Commissioner's Residence, Jerusalem, 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. His upper-middle-class family pushed him to pursue a career in the military. After attending Sandhurst, he was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the British Army and found himself in the trenches at the 1917 Battle of Passchendaele, near Ypres in 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. Studies After the war, he travelled to Canada where he studied architecture at McGill University, Montreal in Canada. He also pursued his favourite hobby: hiking. Later in life, while living in Jerusalem, he once walked from Amman, Jordan, to Cairo. Harrison completed his architectural studies at the School of Architecture at University College, London. Greece Harrison joined the Department of Reconstruction for 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. Palestine (1923-37) His next position (from 1923 onwards) was as Chief Architect to the Department of Public Works in the civil administration of British Palestine, which led to him designing various edifices in places such as Jerusalem and Amman. As the Chief Architect in Palestine from 1923 to 1937, Harrison