Harries, Karsten

Bio Sketch

Karsten Harries is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Yale, working on the philosophy of architecture, Heidegger, and the ethical function of art. His The Ethical Function of Architecture (1997) distinguishes building from architecture and argues for architecture's ethical/communal role. He is a key figure in Geoffrey's phenomenology of place and modernity & dwelling areas.

Key Works

• *The Ethical Function of Architecture* (1997) — building vs. architecture; ornament vs. decoration; the grave and the monument.
• Essays on dwelling, the temple, and the "labyrinth" as counter-model.

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Dwelling
• Critical Architecture
• Everyday Life

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Harries anchors Geoffrey's phenomenology of place and ethics of architecture: his distinction between building and architecture, and his account of genuine ornament as carrying a "promise of … genuine community," give a normative-critical standard against which both functionalist and spectacular architecture can be judged.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• The Ethical Function of Architecture (Harries 1997)
• The Everyday, Building, and Architecture (Haapala, drawing on Harries)
• The Future Is Hairy
• The waiting room (Hedges 2018) — engagement: the chapter cites Harries's "Buildings and the Terror of Time" (Perspecta 19, 1982, p. 64) for its aesthetic thesis — the waiting room "becomes an architecture that renders itself uninhabitable to the extent that we understand aesthetic experience – not as a recollection of a timeless reality, but as an experience that is as if it had no duration." Harries's terror of time supplies the waiting room's paradox: an architecture built to be experienced without duration. See waiting-room, aesthetic-experience, temporality.
• *Why Architecture Matters* (Goldberger 2009) — the ethical function adopted as the bridge between aesthetics and social purpose: 'Architecture has an ethical function in that it calls us out of the everyday… it beckons us toward a better life' and 'One task of architecture is to preserve at least a piece of utopia' (p. 39); the conclusion that 'we build… because we believe in a future' (pp. 39–40).