Professor of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University, School of Engineering, 1952-1984; Chairman, Columbia University, Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Division of Architectural Technology, 1974-1984; he ended his career as the Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Charles Batchelor Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Columbia University;

Honorary doctorate, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, NJ; honorary doctorate, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; AIA Medal, American Institute of Architects; Gold Medal, Acoustical Society of America; Gold Medal, Audio Engineering Society; Franklin Medal, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, PA; Sabine Medal, Acoustical Society of America; Mayor's Award for Science and Technology of the City of New York; Pupin Medal, Columbia University, 1998;

B.S., Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, Westwood, Los Angeles, CA, 1938; M.S., Physics, University of California, Los Angeles, Westwood, Los Angeles, CA, 1940; Ph.D., Physics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA, specialization in acoustics, 1940-1945;

His father worked as a physician; while ministering to patients during the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic, he himself contracted the disease and died. Raised by a single mother, he lived for most of his childhood in Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA, where he became immersed in the culture of the movie industry. According to the New York Times, the Warner Brothers sound stages were located across the street from his junior high school; he visited the Warner studios just after sound production became common in films, c. 1930. (See William Grimes, "Cyril Harris Dies at 93; Fine-Tuned Concert Halls," New York Times, 01/08/2011,Accessed 04/10/2012.) He attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in Westwood as a undergraduate and graduate, and then moved to Cambridge, MA, for doctoral training at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1940. He lived in MA until 1945, when he became an early employee of Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ, one of the first corporate research campuses. He then moved to New York, NY, where he became a Professor of Electrical Engineering in the Engineering School at Columbia University. Aside from consulting trips made to concert halls being built around the US, he remained in New York until his death at age 93.

Cyril Harris married Ann Schakne in 1949. She worked as a book editor for Harper and Row and Bantam Press in New York, NY.

He was survived by a daughter, Katherine, of Arlington, MA, and a son, Nicholas, of Edmonton, AB.

Harris worked on the acoustics of several West Coast concert halls, including Seattle's Benaroya Hall and UC San Diego's Prebys Conrad Music Center. Other venues included: the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, NY, (1966), Powell Symphony Hall, Saint Louis, MO, (1968), Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Urbana, IL (1969), the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, New York, NY, (1971), Symphony (later Abravanel) Hall, Salt Lake City, UT, (1979), and the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Bombay, India (1980). His obituary in the New York Times stated of his career: "Mr. Harris was a traditionalist intent on taking the full, resonant sound of the great 19th-century concert halls to their modern descendants, whose cleaner, less ornamented architecture often proved fatal to classical music. In an age of steel, glass and concrete, he favored wood and plaster, an approach that proved highly successful in a string of triumphs that began in 1966 with the Metropolitan Opera, whose acoustics he designed with the Danish engineer Vilhelm Jordan." (See William Grimes, "Cyril Harris Dies at 93; Fine-Tuned Concert Halls," New York Times, 01/08/2011,Accessed 04/10/2012.) In total, Harris designed more than 100 concert halls during his career.

• Detroit, MI (Architect's Birth)
  Detroit, MI

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• New York, NY (Architect's Death)
  New York, NY

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