Jews to their land as an act of salvation and historic justice. He later wrote that the Zionist enterprise was ‘forming for England “a little loyal Jewish Ulster” in a sea of potentially hostile Arabism’.10 Storrs saw Jerusalem through the religious-orientalist perspective of a European purview, and his role in Herodian terms, as a link in the long line of the city’s builders. Although Jerusalem of the late Ottoman era was a rather cosmopolitan city, with large, often lavish, compounds belonging to different nations and faiths, the war had transformed it quite radically. Mud, wood and tin constructions proliferated as Jerusalem became a destination for war refugees. For the British administration the urgent urban problem was the city’s ‘parasitic population … priests, caretakers, monks, missionaries, pious women, clerks, lawyers, and a crowd of riffraff’. The Jewish Quarter was referred to as a ghetto possessing ‘the squalid ugliness and disharmony of the cities of south-eastern Europe’.11 An artificial topography had been created outside the city walls by generations of refuse deposited there.
Determined to find a solution to the city’s ‘overcrowding and unsightliness’, Storrs invited Alexandria’s British city engineer, William H. McLean, to draw up a redevelopment plan. McLean arrived in Jerusalem in March 1918 and took two weeks to submit an initial report to the military administration recommending that all new structures within the Old City, including those rooftops that were visible from higher ground, were ‘to be constructed of and covered with stone’.12 Furthermore, according to McLean, the municipality should have removed all rubbish and ‘ramshackle buildings’ abutting the external perimeter of the Old City wall in order to make way for a ring-shaped park where thousands of trees were to be planted. Set in the centre of this green parkland, the Old City was to be presented as a precious rock, an exhibition-piece of living biblical archaeology. On 8 April 1918, a week after McLean’s departure, Storrs declared a freeze on all construction within and around the Old City. He went on to ban the use of plaster, mud, tents or corrugated iron as construction materials, stating that only local limestone was to be used in the construction of new buildings, extensions and rooftops within the perimeter around the Old City.13 Storrs then invited an architect of the British Arts and Crafts movement, Charles Robert Ashbee, one of the main promoters of ‘colonial regionalism’, whom he had met during his service in Cairo, to become director of a newly founded Pro-Jerusalem Society, which was conceived in 1919 to oversee the preservation and reconstruction of the city according to the McLean plan.
For Storrs, stone embodied biblical tradition. ‘Jerusalem is literally a city built upon rock. From that rock, cutting soft but drying hard, has for three thousand years been quarried the clear white stone, weathering blue-grey or amber-yellow with time, whose solid walls, barrel vaulting and pointed arches have preserved through the centuries a hallowed and immemorial tradition.’14 Although the stone regulation attempted to reinforce an image of orientalized locality, it had also made the cost of new construction prohibitive to all but the rich, the British authorities, and large overseas organizations; paradoxically, therefore, by pricing out the local population of Jerusalem, it delocalized the city with its own supposed vernacular crafts and architecture.
Although the aim of the McLean plan and Storrs’ stone regulation had been to isolate and differentiate the Old City from its surroundings, ten years after Storrs’ departure from Jerusalem, in the 1936 Town Planning Ordinance, the stone regulation was extended to apply to the entire municipal area and, significantly, to the new neighbourhoods that were rapidly sprawling beyond the Old City walls. By requiring the same architectural rigour outside the walls, this amendment allowed the outer neighbourhoods to share in the city’s particular visual character.15 The spread of Jerusalem had been accelerated by the relative prosperity of the 1920s and by improvements in building technology. As concrete technology developed and concrete structures became cheaper, more available and more efficient, the Arts and Crafts tradition promoted by Ashbee and Storrs through the Pro-Jerusalem Society, with its emphasis on traditional stone construction, came under attack from developers and builders. Towards the end of World War II and the period of the British Mandate, the pressure to develop led to a compromise that was represented by a seemingly minor textual modification of the stone regulation. While the previous Ordinance of 1936 demanded that ‘the external walls of all buildings shall be constructed of stone’, the masterplan of 1944 confirmed practices that were already in effect when it demanded only that ‘the external walls and columns of houses and the face of any wall abutting on a road shall be faced with natural, square dressed stone’16 [my emphasis]. This amendment reduced the role of stone from a construction material to a cladding material. Stone became a stick-on signifying element for creating visual unity between new construction and the Old City, thus visually confirming the municipal boundaries – as whatever building appeared to be built in stone was perceived part of the city of Jerusalem.
With the years, the layer of stone has thinned. At the beginning of the Mandate period, and following the principles of the ‘Arts and Crafts’ movement, stone was primarily used as a construction material, and walls were made of large blocks of solid stone. Since the 1930s a mixed concrete and stone construction technique became more common and a thinner layer of stone – 20cm thick – became part of the structural logic of the building, and together with reinforced concrete, took some of the building load. As mere cladding, the stone has become thinner still and no longer formed a structural part of the building. Today, Israeli building standards allow layers of sawn stone just 6cm thick.
In the 1948 war, Jerusalem was divided between the Kingdom of Jordan and the state of Israel, with the former securing total control over the Old City and its eastern neighbourhoods. In the Jordanian city, whose size under Jordanian administration was deliberately restricted to prevent it competing with the Jordanian capital, Amman, the 1944 masterplan still remained in full effect. The plan was updated in 1964 by its original architect, Henry Kendall, a Briton who continued to enforce the stone cladding bylaw throughout the entire though compact Jordanian city. On the other side of the partition lines, until the 1967 war, Jerusalem’s 1955 planning codes separated the Israeli part of the city into rings in which the use of stone was required to varying degrees.17 At the centre, comprehensive use of stone cladding on all visible planes of the building was still required. In the second ring out from the centre, the requirement became more lenient, allowing the use of other materials to varying degrees, while the outermost circle, which included the industrial areas, was entirely liberated from the requirement to use stone. In the post-1967 period, this logic was effectively inverted. The demand for a varied application of stone was replaced by a unifying regulation that demanded the most rigorous application of stone cladding throughout the entire expanded municipal area. Since most new construction now took place on the periphery of the city, remote West Bank hilltops, never historically part of Jerusalem and now gerrymandered into it as sites for new construction, fell within the legal boundaries of the most rigorous application of the stone bylaw.
This time, the demand to stone clad the housing projects in the new Jewish neighbourhoods met with the resistance of Israeli developers. Indeed, two political considerations seemed to meet head on over this issue. The Ministry of Housing, implementing government policy, wanted to promote new construction as fast and as far away as possible from the city centre in order to buttress Israeli claims to the entire annexed area. Fast construction meant doing it cheaply and there was no place in such a scheme for the rigorous use of expensive stone cladding. The alternative, political-aesthetic consideration was presented by Mayor Kollek and his Deputy Mayor for Physical Planning, the historian Meron Benvenisti, who wanted a smaller, denser city, and to make new neighbourhoods appear as parts of an organic whole by demanding the use of stone cladding.18 Facing intense government pressure, the municipality has been unable to determine the location and size of the new neighbourhoods. Furthermore, although the Jerusalem planning department and even Mayor Kollek personally insisted that the extra investment in stone cladding would repay itself in little over a decade through savings on repainting and other maintenance costs, developers were under pressure to reduce their immediate expenses, and so insisted on a relaxing of the bylaw.19 Under the jurisdiction of the municipality, the bylaw was not relaxed, but developers were granted a bizarre but revealing concession: the stone
