Such tussling only served as a prelude to actual, physical warfare. In April 1936, the bickering and bargaining of the various committees were all but drowned out by far louder and more ominous noises—gunshots, explosions, sirens.
Angered by British policy regarding the political status of Palestine and alarmed by the number of Jewish immigrants who’d flooded the ports since Hitler’s rise (the country’s Jewish population had more than doubled in the past five years), many local Arabs were profoundly concerned by both the present situation and the future they saw unraveling before them. Over the course of just a few days in the middle of the month, a string of murders and murderous reprisals—Arabs killing Jews, Jews killing Arabs—gave way to angry demonstrations, attacks by vengeful mobs, and harsh police reaction. The Arab leadership then declared a general strike, and low-grade but very real violence erupted throughout the country, with stabbings and stonings, explosions and arson becoming regular occurrences. As a result of the events—which the Jews and the British described as “the riots” or “disturbances” and the Arabs would come to call “the revolt”—modern Jerusalem split for the first time in its history into something like two, with Arab-owned shops in the Old City and nearby neighborhoods shuttered, as residents of the mostly Jewish quarters tried to pretend that everything was normal. Jews avoided the Arab areas, and Arabs skirted the more pervasively Jewish zones.
The uprising, meanwhile, landed right on Hadassah’s front step, and Chaim Yassky found himself running a kind of urban field hospital out of the cramped old building on the Street of the Prophets. Although a few Arab outpatients still received treatment at the radium institute there, they didn’t stay on the wards—“owing to the lack of vacant beds,” according to Yassky—and for now he’d have to put off his dream of directing a broadly ecumenical institution that would serve as a medical haven for all the people of this very mixed city. Instead, Hadassah evolved into a charged symbol of Jewish Jerusalem during this period, its “nerves,” in the words of one American eyewitness, “drawn tight as a fiddle string.” Extra beds were squeezed into the hospital, doctors placed on twenty-four-hour call, and the nursing staff was expanded. The wounded were rushed in for treatment, the dead hauled straight to the morgue; Jewish refugees from the Old City and Hebron lived in squalor in camps around town, and nurses from the hospital were sent to care for them. The beleaguered medical workers reckoned with cases that ranged from the mundane but potentially fatal (as, for instance, when ptomaine poisoning “caused by eating decayed foods” broke out among the refugees and the hospital suddenly teemed with patients) to the extreme and gory. A Jewish professor of Arabic was shot dead while working at home at his desk, the bullet exploding inside his head, resulting in wounds the usually restrained Yassky described in his report on the incident as “horrible … Part of the brain and the skin of the skull were found on the walls and the floor.”
But even as Yassky and his staff tried to get on with the grisly work of tending to the injured and to the dead, and of helping the police investigate each incident, they were also saddled with the difficult task of, as one local journalist put it, “sooth[ing] the seething crowd.” Every time an Arab killed a Jew, large throngs massed outside the building’s gates, demanding some kind of catharsis. In the instance of the professor’s brutal murder, according to Yassky, “Despite my objections, the District Officer (a Jew) arranged that the funeral orations be held in the courtyard of the hospital, and the whole crowd tried to push its way into the hospital grounds.”
On another occasion, three people—including one Polish-born doctor who worked at the hospital—were shot dead on their way out of a screening at the Edison Cinema, just a few streets away. Ironically enough, Yassky had given himself a rare Saturday night off and was there to see the early show of a Russian film called Happy Is the Day. Instead he wound up treating gunshot wounds and riding the short distance back to work in an ambulance. Again he had to prevent an angry mob from storming the hospital grounds and now ordered extra gatekeepers to block the crowd from surging into the building itself. The next day, the Jewish parts of town shut down completely for the tripartite funeral: workshops and stores closed, offices and schools let out early, the university canceled classes, and an enormous horde—estimates ranged up to thirty thousand—gathered before the balcony of the hospital, where the corpses were laid out, wrapped in prayer shawls. As the politicians gave their speeches (“Innocent blood has once more been spilled on the stones of Jerusalem…”), the “hysterical weeping” of one of the widows could be heard from inside the ward where she was being treated for shock.
All of which is to say that the hospital had, as one Hebrew newspaper account put it, “unwittingly become the depot of the sadness and pain of the entire city.” And while Yassky and his staff experienced real depression as they reckoned with the most tangible aspects of the often abstract struggle that had now seized hold of the land, he attempted to keep things as ordinary as possible: “Purposely,” he wrote, “because of the high tension in Jerusalem, I called meetings of the building committee and medical advisory committee, and not only urgent problems but even the smallest detail of daily routine was attended to.” When asked by a reporter about “news with regard to the erection of the healing center on Scopus,” Yassky answered that “even during the riots we are not discontinuing our preparations for one moment.”
“‘When will building operations be begun?’
‘At the end of July, or early in August, at the latest.’
And the work goes on…”
* * *
Much of that work went on in London, to which Mendelsohn happened to return just before the mayhem set in, and at the Rehavia windmill in his absence. Even as the local rhetoric was cranked up several notches (“I need hardly attempt a description of the pall of excitement and grief which hangs over the city,” wrote one Hadassah official in Jerusalem to her counterpart in New York that May, “nor need I tell you that any attempt at routine work is merely a brave show”), he and Kempinski and their assistants labored over the specifics of the new hospital. During this time they drew up a structural system, mapped rooms, began to render the final plans to scale, calculated preliminary stresses, and met with various consultants, quarry representatives, and building firms to discuss possible contracts.
Was it really just a brave show? In fact, Mendelsohn himself seemed basically undaunted. “The work was interrupted by the present disturbances in Palestine,” he wrote crisply in a report composed that same month, “only in so far as negotiations with the special firms are concerned.”
And it wasn’t just his distance from the anger and gore that made this possible. When he returned to Palestine in early July, he hardly missed a beat, enthusing to Luise about the “fresh and delicious” air that blew even at midnight, his first back in Jerusalem. He wrote her of the smooth functioning of the office and the now routine wrangling with the Hadassah committees—mentioning the more general troubles only telegraphically and parenthetically: “Schocken is in a good temper. I was all day yesterday at his construction sites, and in the evening (curfew pass) at his house until after midnight.” The completion of the Schocken house had been delayed because stone deliveries had stopped with the closure of the quarries.
The violence itself went almost unmentioned as he described the state in which he found his various projects. Incomplete though it may have been, the Schocken house pleased him especially. It was “still a naked babe without the frills and ruffles of greenery but already it stretches out above the three amphitheater-like terraces of the great slope … Everything is very beautiful and generous in scale.” And a trip to the Mount Scopus site at long last exhilarated him. The medical complex existed so far only on paper, but he could already see it standing sublimely on its hill. “The chief building seems to stretch from Jerusalem to Saudi Arabia—so long does it appear. The maternity section lies close by the Arab village on the slope down to the Dead Sea. The view,” he wrote, “is timeless. He who dies here has not far to travel.” He’d also been having “exciting days,” sketching the Anglo-Palestine Bank, slated for a central spot downtown, on the Jaffa Road, beside the new post office, which was currently under construction.
For all his architectural enthusiasm, however, Mendelsohn was hardly oblivious to what was happening around him. The next few years would, he knew, be “lean and uncertain.” Recent events had taken a severe monetary toll on Hadassah, and Yassky had warned him that the hospital project “must be executed at minimum cost.” Otherwise, the entire building program would be scrapped. The problem wasn’t just the strain on local resources, but the difficulty of fund-raising abroad in the midst of such a crisis. Though Yassky didn’t tell Mendelsohn this, he confided to several of his Hadassah colleagues that collecting American donations had become extremely difficult of late, since “certain elements of Jewry in the Diaspora are becoming apprehensive with regard to the Zionist undertaking.”
The bank plans also remained up in the air. Within weeks of his return, Mendelsohn found himself in the painful position of having to give his assistants at the windmill notice that if the major projects on which they were now working weren’t built, he’d be forced to lay them all off. Nothing these days was sure.
Beyond absorbing the effect on his business interests, Mendelsohn’s inner seismograph certainly also registered the political tremors right underfoot. The troubles rattling Palestine, though, seemed to him a set of fainter aftershocks from the quakes that rocked the wider world. In his letters of these months, he made no more than glancing reference to the bloody local situation and instead worried aloud about Spain and England, Hitler and Lenin, tyranny and freedom, the last great war, and the next. “We thought that after the initial burst of gunfire, the world war was already the resolution, the culmination,” he wrote Luise in August. “Today we know that these were only the cracks showing before the collapse. How difficult it will be to clear away the rubble heap, to begin to rebuild the foundations.” Mendelsohn wasn’t one to use architectural metaphors lightly, and—faced with the crumbling edifice of a whole continent—he seemed to know of no other option than to apply himself to the construction of actual buildings here, on another.
At 8:30 a.m. on October 21, 1936, Erich Mendelsohn and Chaim Yassky led a tour of some hundred dignitaries, reporters, university officials, and Hadassah representatives around the Scopus site, where the outlines of the hospital, the nursing school, and the medical school had been marked in chalk. A handkerchief in his breast pocket, fedora tilted slightly, Mendelsohn excitedly outlined his plans for the whole complex. A pickaxe was hoisted, soil turned, and the building begun.
* * *
Yassky may not have confided in him the difficulty of fund-raising in these turbulent times, but Mendelsohn didn’t need to be told. He could see for himself the effect that financial and political pressures were having on the breathless way the cityscape piled up, and on his own plans as they emerged from his mind and his pencil. Try as he might to concentrate on the matter at hand, those concerns weighed heavily on him, and he had to fight to keep a certain contraction of ambition, a blurring of vision, from taking hold.
To its idealistic American sponsors, the new and improved Hadassah hospital meant much more than spacious wards, state-of-the art labs, and surgical departments for the ill. It served as a symbol made of stone, and they intended its construction to demonstrate the strength and resolve—the robust health, in fact—of the country’s Jewish population, to promote in the most pointed way Jewish industry, and to employ as many Jewish laborers as possible. As originally planned, some five hundred were slated to be hired to work at the building site over the course of several years, and materials—from the Gasoconcrete floor insulation to the 15,000 square meters of tilework, 50,000 sacks of cement, the Oil-O-Matic heating apparatus, the 260 beds, and all the bathroom fixtures—were to be ordered from Palestinian Jewish firms. Articles extolling this fact would be published in the country’s Hebrew and English press, where the decision to buy locally and Jewishly would be declared, for instance, “a source of great satisfaction to the public.” Unlike Schocken, who’d ordered the materials for his house and library packed neatly into those German shipping containers and sent to Jerusalem, Hadassah demanded that its contractors provide written assurances that they weren’t using any German goods at all. If they were found to be doing so, they’d be forced to pay a fine. Never mind the quality of the stuff in question. What mattered most was that it wouldn’t be German; it wouldn’t be Arab; it would be guaranteed Made by Jews in the Land of Israel.
Aesthetic considerations of the sort that tended to obsess Erich Mendelsohn were, in other words, a very low priority here. To even suggest such a subject in the context of the rampant unemployment, seeping bloodshed, and social instability that currently plagued Palestine was to seem somehow detached or indulgent, swayed by suspiciously effete foreign concerns.
In a state of emergency—which most of the Jews of Palestine believed that this was and would inevitably continue to be—who had time for such niceties?
* * *
A few weeks after that pickaxe was first wielded at the hospital site, a royal commission arrived from London “to ascertain the underlying causes of the disturbances.” The general strike had just ended, but the violence throughout Palestine persisted, and the king had sent this group of serious men in three-piece suits to determine whether “either the Arabs or the Jews have any legitimate grievances” against the British Mandate, and, if so, to make recommendations.
In order to do that, the commission—an earl, a baronet, a bevy of lords—set up their headquarters in the ballroom of Jerusalem’s prematurely bedraggled Palace Hotel. Perhaps it was coincidence, but the derelict condition of this large hall and the once sumptuously appointed building that held it seemed to indicate something more general about the declining state of things both physical and fraternal in Palestine. The hotel’s establishment in the late 1920s had itself been a product of the increasingly charged atmosphere surrounding construction in Jerusalem. Commissioned by Palestine’s main Islamic governing body, the Supreme Muslim Council, under the leadership of the mufti, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the building had first been designed as a luxury apartment house by a well-known Turkish architect and staunch Ottoman nationalist named Ahmet Kemalettin, who’d been invited to Palestine by the council in 1922 to renovate the al-Aqsa Mosque. That apartment house never materialized, and when Kemalettin left town and eventually died in Ankara in 1927, the plans were placed in the hands of his assistant, one Mehmed Nihad, who was asked to refashion the design as a grand hotel, conceived in the same lavish neo-Suleimanic style that his mentor had envisioned. Stretching a full city block, it was set on the edge of the flourishing commercial neighborhood known as Mamilla, just beyond the busy area outside the Jaffa Gate, and it featured an impressive battery of Eastern flourishes. With wide horseshoe-arched windows, decorative rosettes, and stalactite-shaped carvings arrayed across its façade, the Palace was clearly designed to make both an architectural and a political statement. Meant to draw tourists from the wider Arab and Muslim world to Palestine, the hotel was also intended to pose of defiant stone challenge to certain major Zionist-sponsored buildings then being erected around the city. And if the fact of the structure itself didn’t make that plain, the symbolism would be literally spelled out in a flowing Arabic inscription, placed high above the entrance. This consisted of a few lines from a carefully chosen seventh-century poem—“We will build as our ancestors built and act as they acted.”
The irony is that, for all the nationalistic muscle flexing surrounding the idea of the hotel—and though building took place during an especially tumultuous period in the country’s history—the actual construction of the Palace constituted a genuinely collaborative project, fruit of the wary coexistence that still prevailed in the city. The mufti himself had employed as contractors—and eventually befriended—two Jews (one of them Chaim Weizmann’s son-in-law) and a Christian Arab, and he would later hire them to build his own house. Though the mufti had stipulated that the contractors should favor Arab workers when hiring, the crews who labored at the site were made up of both Arabs and Jews. And when the hotel’s festive opening took place in late 1929, a British official had raised a toast to the Supreme Muslim Council, to the Turkish architect Nihad Bey, and to George Barsky, the establishment’s Jewish proprietor, while the mufti had heaped public praise on his non-Muslim contractors. Described in the local press as providing “at last … a meeting place for people of all creeds and races,” the Palace was also the most luxurious new hotel in the Middle East. Offering its guests what advertisements called “EVERY COMFORT OF A DISTINGUISHED HOTEL-DE-LUXE,” it featured not only extravagant al-Asqa–meets–Art Deco ornamentation, but all the latest amenities—including central heating, hot and cold running water, three elevators, and more than sixty telephones.
Distinguished and deluxe though it may have been, the Palace went bankrupt after just a few years, when the still more luxurious King David Hotel opened down the street. Financed and owned by Egyptian Jews, planned and managed by Swiss Christians, it was, according to its Zurich-trained architect, Emil Vogt, meant to “evoke the memory of the ancient Semitic style and the atmosphere of the glorious period of King David.” It had a massive symmetrical façade fashioned of both smoothly cut and heavily rusticated stone, and, playing on that First Temple theme, its interiors featured darkly stained cedar, rich marble floors, elaborate fluted columns, and stylized “biblical” decorations—a fanciful mishmash of “Phoenician,” “Hebrew,” and “Assyrian” motifs, swirled through with painted grapevines and pomegranates. Although the King David wasn’t technically a Zionist establishment—neither its owners nor architect were Palestinian Jews and it had been constructed at the urging of various British officials, who felt the country needed a hotel of the posh class they’d enjoyed during their postings in Egypt—its grand opening right on the heels of the Palace’s own did add an unfortunate architectural dimension to the national struggle then seizing hold of the city. More than a contest between a couple of high-end modern hotels, the showdown between the Palace and the King David seemed to pit two of Jerusalem’s most beloved and sacred ancient structures against one another—a fantasia on the al-Aqsa Mosque vs. a fantasia on Solomon’s Temple.
That said, for all the heavily scriptural symbolism of its design, the King David did in fact function throughout most of the Mandate as a swank private club of sorts for well-heeled Arabs, Jews, Englishmen, and foreigners alike—“the great meeting place of the city,” according to one British army officer who used to drink at its bar and lounge in its garden. The top floors of the hotel would also go on to become the headquarters of the British Secretariat and military command, and an imposing emblem of foreign rule: In July 1946, the King David would famously be bombed by the armed right-wing Jewish underground, the Irgun—one whole wing demolished, ninety-one people killed. But even amid the violence, it would continue to serve, and still serves today, as one of the city’s most exclusive hotels, albeit one where the guests are almost entirely Jewish and/or foreign.
With the closure of the Palace, meanwhile, that building took on a much bleaker, more functional look as the British government leased it and moved some of its offices there. Rooms were divided with concrete blocks. Graphs and maps hung on the walls.
In preparation for the London commission’s arrival (its members would be staying in style at, of all places, the King David), the high arabesque-entwined marble columns that framed the octagonal lobby of the Palace had been given a clean coat of white paint, the ballroom aired out, and a large semicircular table dragged in. Here, over the course of several months in the late fall of 1936 and winter of 1937, the British dignitaries would hear detailed evidence from expert witnesses—English, Jewish, Arab—about everything from population growth to hygienic conditions to water supply to European anti-Semitism to the export of olive-oil soap to the high rate of taxation among the Arab fellaheen … as they tried to find a way to make sense of what they’d call in their report the “present problem of Palestine.” No other “problem of our time is rooted so deeply in the past,” though the real question was the future, which weighed heavily under the flowery ceiling and ornate chandeliers, remnants of the earlier, more hopeful life of the Palace Hotel.
* * *
Beyond the ever escalating conflict between Arabs and Jews, the Jews themselves were increasingly at each other’s throats. Soon after building began on Mount Scopus, gangs of Jewish activists from Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s militantly nationalistic Revisionist party who believed their workers had been shut out of the project by the left-leaning authorities stormed the construction site and the Hadassah offices on the Street of the Prophets. In the course of one such rampage, they smashed furniture, ripped doors from their hinges, scattered files, and even assaulted several nurses; on another occasion, a brawl broke out around the concrete mixers and newly dug foundation pits on Mount Scopus, with the Revisionist laborers charging the Socialists and starting a fistfight.
The battle was both physical and rhetorical, as an official from the Revisionist movement wrote angrily to Hadassah’s American headquarters, claiming that “the Socialist … groups terrorized the Hadassah Building Committee” and threatened to declare a strike if the Revisionist workers were employed. The Revisionists insisted that they were the ones who were attacked and that “the report about the demolishment of the Hadassah offices is a deliberate distortion of the facts by the Leftist controlled news agency.” Yassky, for his already overworked part, was forced to take time out from treating patients, running the hospital, managing budgets, and overseeing the complicated building project to defend Hadassah’s local hiring practices. In a telegram to New York, he recounted: VIOLENT DEMONSTRATIONS OF REVISIONIST WORKERS HAVE TAKEN PLACE … THEY ARE BELIEVED TO BE EXPLOITING MATTER FOR POLITICAL PURPOSES STOP. The contractors were willing to hire laborers from the full range of Zionist streams but EVEN IF CONSENT GIVEN BY ALL CONCERNED TO THIS PRINCIPLE WE DO NOT BELIEVE THEY WILL BE SATISFIED SINCE THEY DEMAND ALLOCATION OF WORK BEYOND ALL PROPORTION AND SEEK POLITICAL PROPAGANDA STOP.
And there in the midst of it all was Erich Mendelsohn, pondering the placement of the hospital’s telephone wires, oil paint vs. whitewash for the hallways, and whether steel or wooden window frames would serve as a better shield from the severe wind and rain that batter Mount Scopus in the winter. According to the minutes of yet another meeting, held in the grimmest midst of the country’s current strife, “Mr. Mendelsohn pointed out … that on steel windows there must be precise workmanship which, he believes cannot be obtained in Palestine for the price Hadassah is willing to pay. For that reason, he felt that it would be preferable to use wood windows. He mentioned also that Palestinian carpenters are now making excellent windows of wood.”
The hospital’s planners were not just confronting the political forest fires that had been deliberately set on all sides; they were also reckoning with incompetence on the part of the quarry, which had been hired solely for ideological reasons: This was the only functioning Jewish stonecutting company in the area, and in the words of one Hadassah official, “There can be no thought of using Arab quarries.” At a certain stage Mendelsohn found himself in the bizarre position of having to defend the very use of stone on this major Jerusalem building.
Even after construction had started, such basic architectural decisions remained up for grabs, and he had to explain patiently that—as municipal regulations dictated—he had designed the hospital expressly with stone in mind. He had in fact been the one to put forth the cost-saving idea of using machine-cut stone for the first time ever in Palestine. But since the quarry had so far proved incapable of delivering even a fraction of the fifteen thousand square meters they had promised, the planners needed quickly to consider other options. Traditionally chiseled taltish stone was mentioned, and dismissed (“apart from the question of expense involved,… Jewish quarries could not possibly provide so much hand-cut stone in time”). Then concrete was proposed, forcing Mendelsohn to insist that “the appearance of a long building with many windows at regular intervals faced in concrete would be deplorable.”
Despite his rigid reputation, he was clearly trying his hardest to be flexible, to mind his manners, to concede as much to his employers as possible without losing sight of his own plan: “Stone,” he informed them, sounding wearier than ever, “gives such a building the life which is its beauty.” Understanding the bureaucratic situation, however, he mostly kept his argument practical. Not only would the last-minute switch to this other building material require the construction of coping and sills, but concrete “very quickly shows cracks and stains, and is very expensive to maintain in good order.” Pipes and fittings would be much harder to mask, and the move to concrete would require his office to draw up an entirely new set of plans, for which—given all the delays that had already plagued the project—there was simply no time.
Bending over backward to make his designs viable, he went so far as to suggest they consider the use of artificial stone, actually a mixture of concrete and stone chippings, “the very idea” of which, he admitted, “sounds at first ridiculous in Jerusalem which abounds in stone.” But it had “many advantages. It could be manufactured to look exactly like natural stone and,” critically, “it is cheaper.”
Much discussion on the subject of artificial stone ensued, with Mendelsohn showing the committee various samples, and someone suggesting that a new (more euphemistic?) term be found to describe the ersatz item. Perhaps “composite stone” would be better. All agreed on the need for secrecy, since if word got out that they were considering buying this other material in quantity, it might force the quarry into bankruptcy and so “the last chance of Jewish stone being produced in Jerusalem would disappear.”
At a certain point Rose Jacobs threatened to halt building entirely unless natural stone was used, and Erich Mendelsohn continued to try his hardest to sound cheerful as he vouched for the physical properties of composite stone. It was, he insisted, “less porous and more durable” than the real thing—as perhaps he was trying to prove himself in the course of all these meetings.
* * *
In the end, because of “permanent difficulties” with the quarries—the workers had gone on strike, the gang-saw malfunctioned, and the whole operation been subject to temporary closure after it was placed in receivership and all the machinery taken as security—Mendelsohn and the committees decided to cover parts of the hospital’s inner courtyard walls with composite stone.
But more than a year later, with the dramatic horizontals of the hospital rising skeletally on the ridge, they were still wrangling about the situation just next door, and what material would best suit the exterior of the medical school. If left “unfaced for some time … [it] will make a very bad impression on American tourists.”
As it was discussed at these interminable meetings, meanwhile, the national state of emergency by now sounded like an almost humdrum feature of the local landscape—as if the rocky political situation in Palestine were just another God-given fact to be reckoned with, like the gusting winds and uneven terrain that made building on Mount Scopus so complicated. Stating frankly that “it seems probable that the situation, bad as it now is, will grow worse,” in July 1937 the royal commission had finally offered its conclusions and recommended partitioning the country between Arabs and Jews, explaining that as a “peculiarly English proverb” puts it, “half a loaf of bread is better than no bread … There is little moral value in maintaining the political unity of Palestine at the cost of perpetual hatred, strife, and bloodshed.”
Though the idea of partition proved popular among most of the liberal Jews Mendelsohn knew, it depressed him, great believer that he was in organic unity. The working class’s “dream of a socialist state with the capital in Tel Aviv is being fulfilled,” he wrote darkly to Luise. Meanwhile Jerusalem—slated to be part of a special British enclave—would be “decapitated” from the rest of the body that was Palestine, and then “commanded to live.” Such an arrangement meant, he told her, “creating a ghetto by political concessions. You take away the ideal, the idea, the dream, the future.” His own heartfelt if slightly hazy thinking about the prospect of Arab-Jewish synthesis seemed more wishful than ever.
That said, he could shift in an instant from despondency in the face of the general situation to delight in the specifics of all he was building. As the whole Hadassah complex took gradual shape, Mendelsohn came to sound amazed by “the grand scope of the long parallel buildings—enthroned between the steep desert slope and Jerusalem.” An understated yet almost topographical force emanated from the hospital’s outline, with its low domes echoing the domes of the Arab villages just below. (The workmen, Mendelsohn said, “in biblical style call them the ‘breasts of the building.’”) And this sleek, quietly curvaceous building bound it to both the landscape and the other buildings in the complex, which, he wrote with a kind of wonder to Luise, “express … freedom, with proportions that sing and have that unaffected simplicity, the logic of which I have been seeking from my early days, and which is my goal.”
Sometimes, after they threw a dinner party or held an impromptu late-night chamber music concert under the windmill’s huge fig tree, they’d pile with their guests into a few cars and make their way up the winding road to Mount Scopus, where they’d wander in the moonlight over the building site. Then—“deeply moved” and overcome by “a mood of reverence and gratefulness” (as Luise would report of one particularly charmed predawn outing)—watch the sun rise over the city.