Austen Harrison

Austen Harrison
Austen Harrison, photo by Dimitri Papadimos
Born	1891 Kent, UK
Died	1976
Nationality	British
Alma mater	McGill University, Montreal
Occupation	Architect
Buildings	Rockefeller Museum
Projects	Buildings of Nuffield College, Oxford

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.

Harrison was born in Kent in 1891. One of his ancestors was the renowned novelist Jane Austen for 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 Battle of Passchendaele, near Ypres in Flanders, Belgium, during World War I. 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-marshalled 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-marshalled. 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.