Austen St. Barbe Harrison (1891–1976)

Studies

After the war, he travelled to Canada where he studied architecture at McGill University, Montreal in Canada. When he returned to England he studied city planning in London.

Greece

In 1919 Piet de Jong a British architect of Dutch descent educated in Leeds, joined the East Macedonian Reconstruction Service in order to rebuild towns destroyed during the Balkan Wars. De Jong and his close friend Austen St. Barbe Harrison worked under Thomas Mawson, a British landscape architect who was invited by the Greek government to assist Ernest Hebrard in the planning of Thessaloniki after the great fire of 1917.

The humanitarian endeavor was complemented with motorcycle escapades through Macedonia and visits to Mount Athos and Istanbul. In these travels, de Jong and Harrison became particularly interested in archaeology and Byzantine monuments. Harrison assisted the ephor of Byzantine antiquities in excavations around Thessaloniki and requested permission from British School director Alan Wace to conduct a survey of Hagia Sophia in Veroia. With the fall of Venizelos's government in 1920, the Reconstruction Service collapsed. The urban designs were finally executed in 1930, when Venizelos returned to power. Harrison left Greece in 1922 to take the position of chief architect of public works in Palestine.

Palestine (1923-1937)

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 planned many public buildings in Jerusalem and other parts of the country, most prominent among them the Rockefeller Museum and Government House, formerly the residence of the British High Commissioner and today the U.N. headquarters in Jerusalem.

Egypt & England

In 1937 he left Palestine, before the Rockefeller Museum opened its doors to the public.He lived and worked in Egypt and Cyprus, 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". Harrison modified the design so that the college looked like "something on the lines of Cotswold domestic architecture", as Nuffield wanted. Harrison's rejected design has been described as Oxford's "most notable architectural casualty of the 1930s". 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.

Malta

Photos by Dimitri Papadimos who first met Austen Harrison, in Cairo in the late 1930s, and is consicered to be his addoped son.

From 1940 to 1942 Malta sustained severe bombing and extensive damage. The " Development and Reconstruction Planning in Malta" paper analyses the plans for reconstruction that were made by the appointed consultants from 1943, Austen Harrison and Pierce Hubbard.