Charles Karsten was born in Haarlem in 1904. There he attends the "School for Architecture, Decorative Arts and Art Crafts" in the period 1922 - 1925, and here he meets his later companion Ben Merkelbach (1901 - 1961). Together they are among the founders of the architects' association De 8 in 1927. In 1929 Merkelbach and Karsten start an architectural firm and put the Nieuwe Bouwen into practice. Their first major commission consists of the construction of 200 houses in the Landlust expansion plan in Amsterdam (1933 - 1937). In their design, they applied open strip construction, breaking through the usual building method of closed building blocks and setting a trend for later urban expansions. The architect duo gained national fame with their first commercial building, the AVRO studio in Hilversum (1934 - 1936 & 1938 - 1940), in which requirements regarding acoustics and soundproofing were decisive for the fan-shaped design. Karsten retires from the firm in 1949 to devote himself entirely to artistry. Merkelbach is not left alone: from 1947, P.J. Elling is employed at the firm, with whom he will now work. Karsten remains connected to architecture: in his artistry he focuses mainly on the application possibilities of visual arts in architecture and urban planning. His passion for art was already awakened in his youth: the Karsten family regularly had artists over, including Piet Mondrian and Kurt Schwitters. Now wanting to take up the profession of art himself, he takes classes at Zadkine and Starreveld. He makes abstract-organic bronze sculptures at first, but from 1950 he works mostly functionally. His most famous work as a designer of outdoor spaces is the "open court" (1967 - 1968) at the headquarters of the Nederlandse Aardoliemaatschappij, the NAM, in Assen, which was completed in 1962 to a design by architect A.C. Nicolaï. Although Karsten was not engaged until after Nicolaï's design was completed, the building and the open court seem intended as a unit. Karsten drew inspiration for the design from the Patio de Los Naranjos, the forecourt of the great mosque in Cordoba, which he had visited shortly before. In 1955, Charles Karsten cast himself as the driving force behind the Liga Nieuw Beelden. With this foundation, Karsten wanted not only to give shape to a new, interdisciplinary branch of visual art, but also to bring about a better professional position for visual artists. In 1969, the League was disbanded because the organization had not been able to achieve enough socially. Karsten died in 1979. By will he leaves his archive to the Netherlands Architecture Documentation Center, the NDB, one of the forerunners of the New Institute. The archive mainly covers the period in which Karsten worked as a spatial designer and contains much material relating to the Liga Nieuw Beelden.