Samuel D. Albert And Was Jerusalem Builded Here... In the four months of my stay at the CCA Study <strong>Centre</strong>, freed from the necessities of teaching and able to devote myself completely to my current book project, And Was Jerusalem Builded Here... <strong>Architecture</strong> and Urbanism in the British Mandate of Palestine, I achieved a number of intellectual, professional, and personal goals and made substantial progress towards completing my manuscript. I read through and organized the research material I had accumulated over the past three years in Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. With the material cogently sorted, organized, and classified, the project as a whole, as well as its accompanying lacunae, became far clearer. I was able to fill many of those holes using the CCA’s extensive and catholic collections. Some of the gaps were previously known to me; others became evident only after sustained scrutiny of my material. Complete runs of major architectural journals unavailable in Israel enabled me to document more thoroughly the reception and perception of Jerusalem and its architecture in the British, French, and American architectural presses; the superlative CCA Library reference collection was also of inestimable aid. The surprising presence of a large number of Hebrew-language publications facilitated my work and enabled me to use the CCA’s resources in conjunction with those materials as well. I also expanded and significantly sharpened the intellectual framework of my project, based both on materials previously unknown to me, which were found in the CCA collection, as well as new ideas that arose from the richness of the materials at my disposal. One significant example I explored was the influence of sixth- and seventh-century Syriac church construction on the work of the Italian architect Antonio Barluzzi, active in Palestine from 1920 to 1960. His personal uncatalogued archive, in which I worked extensively, can be found in the 20 Franciscan order’s archive in Jerusalem; his professional library has been dispersed. The availability at the CCA of almost any architectural book Barluzzi might have used as a primary or secondary source meant that I was able to reconstruct his historical sources more accurately, along with his interpretation of those sources. The CCA Library contains pristine examples of both primary sources on which Barluzzi based his work, as well as substantial secondary sources, including Barluzzi’s own rare book on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. In addition to financial and material support, including access to CCA Library holdings of periodicals and books, the Study <strong>Centre</strong> also provided me with an invaluable intellectual enrichment, an environment that encouraged me to think much more critically of my work than I previously had. This critical rethinking was furthered by my interactions with fellow scholars as well as with the staff of the Study <strong>Centre</strong> and the CCA. One of the great strengths of the Visiting Scholars Program is the opportunity to interact with other scholars. To name just two examples: Maarten Delbeke and Wallis Miller used their own areas of expertise, Pilgrimage <strong>Architecture</strong> and German <strong>Architecture</strong> of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, to look at my subject, <strong>for</strong>cing me to expand my thinking to include those issues I had not previously thought germane. As a result, my own arguments became broader, wider ranging, and more topical. In fact, daily contact with all of the resident scholars as well as visiting scholars was one of the most rewarding and edifying aspects of my four-month stay. In addition to the intellectual work I accomplished and the concurrent progress in thinking about my topic, I made significant advances in writing: at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting in Providence, I was able to put together <strong>for</strong> a publisher a book proposal resulting from my research and writing at the <strong>Centre</strong>.
The advantages I gained by being at the CCA were numerous: the time and opportunity to devote myself to my own work, the availability of significant research materials, and stimulating intellectual discourse – all of which contributed to substantial progress on my book. 21
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