ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN LUND KRIKEN Interviewed by Suzanne ...

ORAL HISTORY OF JOHN LUND KRIKEN
Interviewed by Suzanne Riess
Compiled under the auspices of the
Ryerson and Burnham Libraries
The Art Institute of Chicago
Copyright © 2009

This manuscript is hereby made available for research purposes only. All literary rights
in the manuscript, including the right to publication, are reserved to the Ryerson and
Burnham Libraries of The Art Institute of Chicago. No part of the manuscript may be
quoted for publication without the written permission of The Art Institute of Chicago.
ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface iv
Outline of Topics vi
Oral History 1
Selected References 257
Biographical Profile 260
Index of Names and Buildings 262
iii

PREFACE
John Lund Kriken was born in 1938, in Berkeley, California. He received his
undergraduate degree in Architecture at University of California Berkeley in 1961 and
his Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1969. He joined
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1970, and was made associate in 1972, associate partner
in 1974, and partner in 1984. Since 2002 he has been consulting partner. As founder of
SOM’s Planning and Urban Design Studio in the San Francisco office, John Kriken
established a legacy of defining the built environment as one in which human and
environmental needs harmoniously coexist.
I first met with John Kriken in early December 2007 for lunch on one of the days that he
was in Berkeley meeting his urban design students. He was, and is, charming,
enthusiastic, keen on his College of Environmental Design students and their real
potential, and interested in the idea of the oral history. Within the month he had sent me
an outline that reflected his commitment to the oral history and his insight into how it
could best be directed and inclusive. It became the skeleton for our interviews, which
began in late January 2008.
We met for six two-hour interviews at Kriken’s studio and office, a separate modern
structure on the street front of the large old Telegraph Hill house and garden he shares
with his wife Kathryn Koelsch. A beautifully designed space, it surrounded us with art
assembled, evidence of books read, objects collected, work done, work being thought
about, pinned drawings, maps, watercolors from many a Bay Area outing with the
Sunday Afternoon Watercolor Society. I am sure that an inch-by-inch tour of that studio
would have yielded text enough to narrate the story of John Kriken’s life and work and
ongoing interests.
Like his friend and fellow SOM partner Marc Goldstein, whose oral history is in this
series, one of the first subjects Kriken wanted to talk about was California Tomorrow, an
achievement in planning that doubtless will be studied far into the future. Published in
1972 as a comprehensive regional analysis for future conservation and development, the
plan examined in detail the alternatives faced by Californians and, by implication, the
nation and the world. California Tomorrow argued for a broad-scale, systematic
approach to solving major environmental, social, and economic problems, focusing on
the interconnections between problems to identify underlying causes of the physical and
psychological disruption of our lives on the land. The document was graphically rich
and easy to understand and seminally important to both Kriken and Goldstein.
Our oral history kept coming back to the California Tomorrow Plan, and also to the San
Antonio Plan. After two years in the Army spent in San Antonio, Kriken stayed on and
worked in that city 1963-1967, attracted, as he says, by people with deep commitment to
art, social causes, civil life, and both local and national politics. Much was learned early
in his career that pointed to later application of principles of urban design, whether at
national, city, or neighborhood scale, or campus scale, or building scale.
Along with a helpful outline of issues to talk about, John Kriken gave me some notes he
had made on cities in decline, and cities experiencing too-rapid growth, the potential
problems of megacities, and the SOM international practice. These were issues that he
was thinking and writing about and they gave impetus to the oral history as not so
much a search back into time as a report on present thinking.
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When I met Kriken he was finishing the manuscript for Building Cities for the 21 st Century,
co-authored with SOM Chicago office partner Phil Enquist. He was continuing his work
as adjunct professor at UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and was on
several design review boards. Urban planning was very much in the news that spring of
2008. He and I were fascinated readers of the New York Times business and arts sections
as they reported almost weekly on dazzling new cities, Asian "hubs" and "grand urban
experiments" in Dubai and elsewhere.
It was a privilege to hear from Kriken how principled planning evolves and continues to
evolve, and what issues get addressed and how problems of cultural differences are
navigated. And it is reassuring to know that as well as practitioner John Kriken is a
devoted teacher with a book that will be a text for future urban designers and planners.
Our hope is that the oral history offers insight into the person and process that underlies
it all.
It was my good fortune to be the interviewer for John Kriken and earlier for Marc
Goldstein, and to reflect through them on the powerful and thoughtful presence of
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in San Francisco, and far beyond. We all, but especially I,
benefited from Mary Woolever’s light but motivating hand from the Chicago Architects
Oral History Project Chicago office.
In addition to John Kriken six other retiring SOM architects and engineers have been
interviewed for the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, hosted by the Art Institute
of Chicago
http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm4/index_caohp.php?CISOROOT=/caohp
To Craig Hartman and his fellow partners at SOM, who have funded these interviews,
we are most grateful for their commitment to recording and sharing their partnership
history.
Suzanne Riess
September 2009
v

OUTLINE OF TOPICS
Childhood and family 1
Early interest in architecture 5
Architecture education at University of California Berkeley 9
Summers as a seaman 26
Military service in the army 28
San Antonio and HemisFair, 1968 30
Early concerns for appropriate design for climate and culture 35
Interest in large-scale urban design projects 38
Graduate school at Harvard Graduate School of Design 38
Early "New Town" planning projects and land use policy 43
California Tomorrow Plan 46
Influences on career choice 51
San Antonio and HemisFair, 1968 54
Transbay Transit Center for SOM 57
Attracted to the potential impact of "urban design" projects 63
Teaching position at Washington University 67
Begins work at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in San Francisco 71
Nat Owings and national planning projects 73
California Tomorrow Plan 77
Early colleagues and projects at SOM San Francisco 82
SOM projects in Iran 90
Kriken's book Building Cities for the 21st Century 92
SOM's "group practice" culture 95
Senior management at SOM San Francisco office 97
Financial crisis in the firm, late 1980s 99
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Diversification of projects and staff 105
Comparison of various SOM offices 110
Attracting and educating clients 114
Designing for different cultures 117
SOM office and partnership structure 129
Selecting a "brand" name architect 141
Transbay Transit Center Competition 147
Designing cities with compact footprints for increasing populations 152
Livability factors in cities 157
Civic activities in San Francisco 160
SOM's competitors and collaborators 169
Personal interests 175
Developing a new project Taipingqiao 179
Environmental design issues and LEED 189
Design development of University of California Merced 197
Developing new clients 209
Challenges for cities and the environment 219
Projects in Vietnam 225
Design advisor to São Paulo 230
Planning corporate headquarters campuses 234
Sunday Afternoon Water Color Society 241
Retiring from SOM 245
Reflections on SOM colleagues 249
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[Tape 1: Side A]
JOHN LUND KRIKEN
Riess: Please tell me about your family background. How and when did your parents
come here from Norway? And what are their names?
Kriken: My mother’s name was Ragnhild Marit Lund. I’ll have to spell it for you. And
Riess: Yes.
my father’s was Johan Eric Nord Kriken. And they came to America in the
mid-thirties. My father had been here before, and he had secured a job on a
merchant ship. I should mention that he was a captain of merchant ships and
traveled the world. In America, he transported petroleum products for
Standard Oil. And he was doing that, of course, in World War II to support the
Pacific war activities. Anyway, I could tell you a couple stories. By the way, is it
okay just to talk, and you’ll organize the interviews later?
Kriken: I don’t want to think sequentially or thematically if I don’t have to.
Riess: No.
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Kriken: But, my father told us that there were two ports in the world he dearly loved.
One was Rio de Janeiro and the other was San Francisco. And he had sailed to
both. And he said, “You know I really thought about settling in one or the
other, because they were such beautiful places, and away from the cold of
Norway.” And I was giving a speech in São Paulo, Brazil, and I mentioned this-
-as a way to try to connect with the audience, I said, “My father loved both
cities. And I [dramatic pause] could have been a Brazilian.” And I don’t know
what I expected, but there was just this kind of eruption in the audience, and
coming back to me was, “You’re so lucky. You’re so lucky.” [laughter] Anyway,
it was… I can’t really imagine myself as a Brazilian, but Brazil is a wonderful
place. I did enjoy Brazil.
Riess: The reason your parents came from Norway was to improve their life?
Kriken: Yes. I should back up and say my father was in America working, and
Riess: Yes.
corresponding with my mother. Then, they got closer to the idea of getting
married, and so he went back to Norway. And they spent a year or so looking
for a way to make their life together in Oslo, Norway. My father was from
farther north, and my mother was from Oslo. And in the end, they chose to
immigrate to the U.S. That was about 1936, after their marriage in 1933, and
then I was born in ’38. During World War II I pretty much grew up without a
father, because his involvement kept him overseas.
2

Kriken: And so my mother was alone in new country, learning English, and struggling
through that time. And well anyway, I really didn’t have a clear idea of who
this man was who would visit us every six months or so, until one evening she
read me a telegram, I don’t remember how old I was, perhaps five. She read it
to me. I don’t know if I quite understood it, but I saw that she was crying, and
that she was referring to this person. And his ship had been torpedoed. But he
survived. Anyway, it was with this trauma, that I finally realized that he was
important and that I had a father.
Riess: That’s a terrifically interesting memory. Do you remember her as being sad and
worried all the time?
Kriken: No. I think it was just that experience at a very early age.
Riess: And you were an only child for quite a long time.
Kriken: For six years, until my brother was born.
Riess: You started out in school here?
Kriken: Yes, and I guess the first thing I remember about elementary school is that I
was always having to stay after school, and it was always for talking in class. I
don’t think I was the one talking; I think it was people talking to me. I was not
particularly performance-oriented, or academically strong in elementary
school, until in the sixth grade I had a teacher who encouraged my drawing
3

and my artwork. I got to be the class artist, and for every assignment the
teacher made, I would make a big mural on butcher paper for the wall, and it
gave me a focus. And then, in that same sixth grade year, I won two art
contests promoted on television. One was from Cartoon Time, and I won a
General Electric clock radio. And then on another program, I won a Wen-Mac
Aeromite gasoline-powered model airplane, and a Columbia Five Star bicycle. I
can still remember that time--I felt like some kind of new world was opening
up for me. I got into college preparatory course work in high school and did
very well academically.
Riess: By that time, of course, your father was back?
Kriken: He was on a more regular schedule. He wasn’t gone for six months in those
days.
Riess: And he validated these things that you were interested in--the art?
Kriken: He did. He kept drawings that I made, and there was one I remember him
talking about. I remember it was a color crayon drawing of a sailboat. It was a
sailboat maneuvering so the sails were luffing. And he thought that was
special. I’m not sure I knew what luffing was at that point, but he liked it.
Riess: I think that’s very interesting, to be identified early.
4

Kriken: I’ve always felt I’ve owed a debt to Mrs. Humphreys my 6 th grade elementary
school teacher because she hit my button, and I made an automatic
turnaround.
Riess: Were you very visually involved with where you were living?
Kriken: I guess I--yes, I think of myself as a very visually-oriented person. And we
lived in the East Bay Hills, both Richmond and El Cerrito, looking back across
to the west which is exactly the direction that my father’s valley in Norway
was oriented, looking west. And for him there was always the setting sun, and
these great craggy, fjord-like cliffs coming down to the ocean; and then this
little piece of openness and sky. He told me about it, and said it represented a
place he had to explore. And every place we’ve ever lived has this western
orientation, including a little country place that we built in northern California.
Riess: That’s in Clear Lake?
Kriken: Yeah. Yeah.
Riess: And that’s the place that he allowed you to design?
Kriken: He said “You want to be an architect; you design it.” So I designed it. We built
the house over two summers. It’s on the lake where we keep our collection of
boats. My brother, his wife Rita, and their boys Ryan and Luke live on the lake
a short distance away. So the lake, for us, has always been about family
5

gathering. I guess by the time I got into high school, I was seriously thinking
that I might pursue architecture. My family didn’t have a lot of knowledge
about professional choices, or schools, or anything like that. It was just good
luck that I became an architect. But in my high school, I did take some drafting
classes. And I would study building plans. And it was at this time that I
designed the lake house. The reason I thought I might make a good architect is
because a Life magazine advertisement by the AIA said you had to be good in
math, and you had to be good in drawing, or expressing yourself in drawing. I
thought, Well, I really love to draw, and I can get by in math. And I like to
build things. My father had a big workshop, so he made things. My brother
and I always had projects in the workshop as well.
Riess: You mean like furniture? Woodworking?
Kriken: Yeah, our father, when home from the sea, could make almost anything,
including building our country house. He would study books on what an
electrician would do to wire the house, and then he would go up there and
apply that knowledge. Or plumbing: he would do the same thing.
Riess: Was he college educated?
Kriken: Only in an engineering sense. He went to schools in Norway that were
teaching navigation and mechanical engineering. I also think he had to learn
about steam turbine engines, and that sort of thing.
6

Riess: So that’s a great legacy, that sense of empowerment that engineers seem to
have, that things work or can be made to work.
Kriken: My brother [Rolf Nord Kriken], who is a sculptor--could have been an architect
too--he had that same sense of empowerment, and worked with his hands. He
has a big art foundry near our country house, and he has kept some of the tools
from our dad’s workshop. So in his foundry I can still see the old vises and the
hammers. And then, I’m just remembering now: our grandfather, on my
father’s side, was a blacksmith in Norway. So it kind of goes back in time.
When we visited Norway as kids, my brother was also given some of the tools
from grandfather’s blacksmith’s shop.
Riess: That’s interesting. I was going to ask whether you had picture books around,
or had seen inspiring buildings. Or whether you went to San Francisco, and
admired the built environment? Was that part of deciding to be an architect?
Kriken: I think the first interest, or orientation, was not because I understood the
difference between a [Bernard] Maybeck building and a tract house, so much
as just the love of building things, and making things, and imagining things. I
loved to make, for example, models of all kinds of boats and planes. But also
cities. I would go to the Saturday movie theater and see a Flash Gordon serial,
and I thought, I’d like to imagine what it would be like to create a city of the
future. I would make those things. And so my interest in architecture was
really just about imagination and the making of things. I don’t think I had any
taste in what’s good or what’s bad, at that point. In fact, probably my visual
7

knowledge was pretty much the Berkeley hills and that East Bay hillside
housing look. Of course we were taken to San Francisco often: Golden Gate
Park. But it never occurred to me then how lucky we were and how uniquely
beautiful it was.
Riess: You said that you did get back to Norway. And you said you spent time as a
family visiting Norway, and you were able to grow up with Norwegian
cousins.
Kriken: Yes.
Riess: Was that influential?
Kriken: Well, this was going back, actually--it started right after the war, because there
had been very little communication between my parents and their families.
And so, as soon as possible, we went. The first trip was just my mother, and
my brother, who was just a baby, maybe a year or two old--and myself. And
we went over on a troop ship from New York.
Riess: From New York. So you took the train across the country?
Kriken: Train across the country, and [from] New York a ship called the Stavanger
Fjord, and then back on a troop ship. We went frequently thereafter. I spent
months with my cousins. And it was enough for me to have a feeling for them
when I go back today.
8

Riess: I wondered about the language.
Kriken: I once could speak Norwegian but I’ve lost most of my vocabulary. It comes
back to me, and I talk a little bit. But I can’t really have a full conversation. All
of my cousins except the older ones speak English very well.
Riess: Did you know any architects? Did you know anyone who was an architect?
Kriken: In high school I had two schoolmates whose fathers were architects. And they
both lived in rather beautiful modern homes. That’s really all. I didn’t sit down
and interview them or have a talk about the profession. I really do think it was
just a love of daydreaming and making things that kind of got me into the first
semester at Berkeley in the College of Architecture.
Riess: And your interest in architecture was city planning, or cities, or…
Kriken: Yeah. It turned out I loved cities most, but first I loved architecture. The
problem of design was more compelling when it was the design of groups of
buildings, rather than an individual building. I could always find more social
and environmental consequences. It just seemed like a more interesting and
complex problem. One of the important things you learned at Berkeley during
my time there, when Wurster was the dean, was about the influence of climate
and geography on architecture. There were many architects who practiced a
Bay Area regionalism. I always did like contextual qualities that made places
different from one another. I carried that with me, all through my city planning
9

and urban design career. But remember-- I went to architecture school when I
was eighteen; I was very naïve.
Riess: Could you have gone to any school you wanted to? Or was it clear that it
would have to be Berkeley?
Kriken: Earlier I mentioned luck. I knew very little about choices. When you think
about the research people put into higher education today, and families start
researching when the children are twelve years old, or even before; but in our
case, I didn’t have a clue about what the best schools were. So that the idea of
going to Berkeley, and it being one of the five best schools in America for
architecture, was just a fluke of proximity. There were other schools the family
talked about, but they didn’t teach architecture, and that narrowed it down to
Berkeley. So it was a limited set of choices that didn’t have a lot to do with
knowing all the possibilities.
Riess: Had you gone to visit the campus a bit?
Kriken: Yes, of course. It’s so close.
Riess: Did you commute from home, or did you live on campus?
Kriken: I did commute from home in the beginning. And then I had a place, a one-
room place near campus.
10

Riess: Was that an important liberating time?
Kriken: When I was there I was comparatively young; I think there was only one other
student who was as young as I was. There were many returning Korean War
veterans who were primarily in their mid- to late-twenties. They had a
maturity and knowledge and sense of purpose, and were articulate about what
they were doing. Meeting these fellow students had a huge impact on my own
sense of purpose.
Riess: These were Korean War veterans who were in architecture school?
Kriken: They had completed their military service in 1956. The war ended in ’53. But
some people must have had additional service time to perform. But anyway,
there they were. One fellow I remember was [Richard] Whittaker, who later
became a partner with Charles Moore. Another one was Jim Terry, who
became a good friend, from New York. They were, of course, from all over, and
that was also interesting. I shouldn’t start trying to name them because there
are so many.
Riess: Do you think there was a big rush to get into architecture or those fields after
that war? Was there something in the air? Or maybe it was just a normal
population of undergraduates. I don’t know.
Kriken: I don’t know either if there was suddenly a jump in the school age population,
or the class population with the Korean War veterans, but it was just very
11

[Tape 1: Side B]
notable that a lot of these people didn’t graduate until they were thirty years
old. And that seems old when one is under twenty.
Kriken: There were also some very interesting professors at Berkeley, at that time. One
was a fellow named Rai Okamoto, who conveyed a wonderfully ideal lifestyle
through architecture. He had an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel in New York,
and he had an apartment on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. He was the first
bi-coastal person I ever knew. Before he died we served together on the San
Francisco Art Commission. There was a group of professors all in their early
thirties: Okamoto, a guy named Sierson from Denmark; Rai was from
Philadelphia.
Riess: These are names I’ve never heard anyone reference before.
Kriken: And Philip Thiel. A name maybe familiar to you?
Riess: No.
Kriken: Thiel later taught at the University of Oregon. Together they formed a small
firm in Berkeley called MOST, M-O-S-T; it was Malony, Okamoto, Sierson, and
Thiel.
Riess: And so these would have been the people who were doing the design studios?
12

Kriken: Yes, that’s right. And of course, Vernon DeMars was a professor there. And my
most favorite professor, the one who had the most impact on me, was Don
Olsen.
Riess: Don Olsen is still around, isn’t he?
Kriken: He is. He’s still around. He was a Modernist; I loved his architecture, it is a
very International style, to be sure. He came from Harvard; he loved to talk
about architecture.
Riess: Did you say because he came from Harvard that was special?
Kriken: I remember that Don Olsen would often talk about Walter Gropius, and others
from the Bauhaus. Gropius also was a dean at Harvard’s Graduate School of
Design. Jose Luis Sert was dean when I was there in ‘68. I liked Don Olsen’s
buildings because they were very ship-like. There was an enthusiasm about his
teaching that everybody liked. He would come to look at students' projects, sit
down by your desk, and would talk for an hour, non-stop. He would talk
endlessly on his student’s ideas. And I definitely came away with a feeling for
the power of ideas, and thinking about solutions--architectural solutions. And
it was about creating an intellectual framework. Architecture wasn’t a
spontaneous, intuitive, artistic activity, but it came out of carefully constructed
rational decisions. And I really loved this process.
Riess: This is a huge dichotomy, isn’t it?
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Kriken: Yeah. It is.
Riess: Who represented the intuitive, spontaneous?
Kriken: Let me think. Who would that be? I remember Rai Okamoto telling me (and
Okamoto was also a very strict Modernist). I remember I did a project--I was
just as naïve as could be. I did a project that was very womb-like; it was an
intuitive approach to the problem. Okamoto said, “You are the most romantic-
minded architect”--or student, whatever term he used--“I’ve ever seen.” And I
thought, My God, what does that mean? I stewed over that for a long time,
about a romantic view versus an intellectual or structured view of what one
does. Eventually I moved more toward a Don Olsen approach. But you asked
who were the people who would be considered spontaneous?
Riess: I told you when I met you at lunch that I’d been reading a book called The
Architecture of Happiness. It made me think about why people decide to be
architects. To quote from the author--“A concern for architecture is somehow
suspect, but architecture renders vivid who we might ideally be.” I wondered
about this statement, and this kind of doing good part, this value.
Kriken: Yeah. I’ll tell you, in high school I was developing a social awareness. I had a
high school friend who became a very well-known doctor in public health. His
father was politically liberal, and his mother was a social activist. And she gave
me literary material. I remember reading the monthly newsletter of the
Longshoremen’s Union. And I thought, My God, it had poetry, it had critiques
14

on books. It was, to me, astonishing that this would be what longshoremen
would be looking at. And of course it was full of the stories about inequality of
social and economic life in America. So I did, at that point, take it in; and I
admired my friend’s parents.
Riess: Do you remember the name?
Kriken: Schroeder. Steve Schroeder.
Riess: You were talking about your design being identified as the “most romantic.”
You know, that just reminds me of the danger of parents or teachers making
statements like that, because you really do have to then make some sense of it
for yourself.
Kriken: Yeah. I thought it could be some sort of negative defining, unchangeable
quality. [laughter]
Riess: Let’s talk about the Berkeley program in architecture. Did it make sense? Did it
get you out at the other end knowing what you needed to know?
Kriken: It was a five-year program: very intense. Even teaching at Berkeley now, I’m
not sure that the students immerse themselves in the subject as deeply as we
did for five years. We had to lower our academic performance on other UC
courses outside of architecture because of the performance required to do well
in architectural school.
15

Riess: So you’re thrown right into it.
Kriken: You’re thrown right into it, and it is an all-consuming thing. Compared with
Riess: Yes.
other people who had been to other schools, I think all the curriculum at that
time was pretty intense, actually. There’s nobody I knew who didn’t stay up all
night at least once a week, trying to accomplish what they had to do. You were
mentioning Joe Esherick at one point: I have a couple of impressions of
Esherick.
Kriken: I had such admiration for him. Actually, before I had him as a teacher, I liked
the things he talked about because it was always a very broad perspective. He
would come into the courtyard where the school of architecture was located
[Northgate Hall] and he’d read a book, or he’d read the New York Times or the
Wall Street Journal. I was impressed with the breadth of his interests, and I
enjoyed talking with him. When I finally took his design studio, I would come
in for my crit, and he would never talk about my problem. And somebody told
me later that this was very much his teaching method, to try to keep moving
you away from whatever it is you were trying to do. For me it was very hard to
understand the method in this approach. But it was consistent. It was hard to
get him to [to respond to] “Help me understand what I’m trying to do that is a
very specific problem for me to solve.” He would always take the subject out to
the next ring and eventually my problem would disappear. He would start
talking about the opposite. And sometimes the connections were hard to make.
16

Still, he may have been right. It never did take away my admiration for his
work. But it didn’t quite fit my learning needs at the time.
Riess: And it’s neither the romantic nor the intellectual, it’s something else?
Kriken: I don’t think we ever talked about that. I’m trying to think what would be a
typical discussion we would have. But it could be about anything, current
events, or anything, but it was generally totally unassociated from the problem
at hand. But the people from his studio--all loved the work they did, and it was
definitely the epitome of regionalism.
Riess: Were you also getting grounding in history, and a look at what was happening
in the world of architecture? Corbusier, Mies? Who was doing that?
Kriken: I am trying to remember. Charles Moore, when he was teaching history, had a
lot to do with European influences.
Riess: Charles Moore taught the history class.
Kriken: Yeah. He was one of our history professors. I think he came toward the end.
And we even had Steen Eiler Rasmussen, the famous Danish historian. But
where did--let me just think… We all loved Corbusier. We couldn’t believe the
sculptural qualities of that work.
Riess: Were you seeing his work in magazines, architectural publications?
17

Kriken: Yeah, we were seeing it in magazines. And probably all the books Corbu was
publishing in those days as well as books of other practitioners still alive and
working in those days; Wright, and Corbusier, and [Alvar] Aalto.
Riess: And they would be referenced in the design classes.
Kriken: That’s right.
Riess: Who were the Wrighteans at Berkeley?
Kriken: Oh, and there was a fellow who was definitely a romantic, he did redwood
buildings with great cantilevers all around the Bay Area.
Riess: [Warren] Callister?
Kriken: He was actually a partner of Callister.
Riess: Jack Hillmer?
Kriken: Jack Hillmer, right. I had one course with him. And he was definitely someone
who spoke to that Wrightean tradition. And we were aware of Callister’s work
too.
Riess: And Vernon DeMars, you mentioned him. I’d like to hear a little bit about
DeMars and Wurster.
18

Kriken: Right.
Riess: DeMars, you said something about his optimism being kind of a signal quality.
Kriken: Yes. He was a cheerleader. And it was fun, you know, to be around him,
because of his constant enthusiasm, which he continued to the day he died. He
would never give up on anything. He was always pushing on something. And
I did admire him greatly for that. He also turned out to be one of the few
practitioners in the school at that time who did big buildings, or bigger
buildings.
Riess: And he had been at MIT, and had worked with Aalto.
Kriken: Yeah. Yeah. And he also worked in a style that we consider “Bay Area.”
Riess: There was a planning department too, wasn’t there? Fran Violich, Jack Kent?
Kriken: Yeah. I got to know Fran and Jack later on. I feel certain I went to lectures they
gave. But I never did study with them.
Riess: Were you pulled by that? Could that have been what you would have done?
Kriken: I never would have been drawn to it as--even in those days you would think of
planning as more of a policy and less of a design question. Although I was
19

Riess: Telesis.
interested in the policies, it was working in design that was my main drive.
And I didn’t know much about that group they had.
Kriken: Telesis, yeah.
Riess: That’s what I’m thinking of. “Progress intelligently planned” was their motto.
Kriken: And Vernon was in that too. But the students were never exposed very much
to Telesis. I’m sure we were introduced to the principles of city planning, and
somebody from the planning school taught us as part of our architectural
training. And I did not feel an attraction. But in the end I liked designing
groups of buildings more than individual buildings.
Riess: Who was talking about redevelopment and preservation, and those issues in
the city?
Kriken: I don’t remember who right now, maybe I’ll think of it. But we did talk about
those aspects. Although I have to say that being in school at that time, there
was not a lot of concern about the environment or preservation as is taught
today. You know, everything was pretty much to be exploited for human
purposes; the environment was not revered in any way. I can remember times
when people from Bechtel came to the school. If there were a water crisis, their
proposal would be, “Let’s dam the San Pablo Bay and make it a fresh water
20

eservoir.” Or, “Let’s develop a pipeline from Alaska and bring it to the Bay,”
or to wherever it was needed in California. It was always man over nature and
there was always a solution.
Riess: An engineering solution.
Kriken: It was an engineering optimism that anything could be solved if we scaled it up
big enough.
Riess: Well, that’s interesting. I checked to see when the College of Environmental
Design, given its name, came about. It says 1959.
Kriken: Oh, okay. Well, so that was during my time there rather than at the beginning.
I remember calling it the College of Environmental Design. But I guess it was
the School of Architecture.
Riess: Was there a consciousness of how unique this was, this bringing together of
these disciplines, including landscape architecture?
Kriken: As a teaching method, I think an interdisciplinary [approach] was beginning to
be manifest in the programs. I’m not sure everybody had values that really
supported the environment. I mean I could say with certainty we did not have
values or knowledge that supported the sensitivity necessary to really develop
an environmentally based design program.
21

Riess: Interesting.
Kriken: I can’t remember exactly what the professors had to say on that point. But I just
[Tape 2: Side A]
remember certainly it was a lot of back and forth about environmental topics--
oh, one of my classmates [Don Royse], for his graduate fifth-year thesis did a
plan for reshaping the coastal hills of Marin County so that you could live on
the coast of Marin County and not be encumbered by fog. He did models with
reshaped hills, and with dry ice could show how the fog could be aligned to
move around areas that could become little sun pockets. The way he achieved
this massive reforming of the land was through a clever use of atomic energy.
Riess: Yeah. And that’s the ‘60s.
Kriken: That is the ‘60s. And certainly, I mean that was all the way leading up to
graduating in ’61. But there was also a lot of challenging going on too. I mean
just in challenging authority, and challenging a lot of things that previously
had been accepted without question like urban renewal and engineering
mentality.
Riess: How involved were you with the student movements, civil rights, student
revolts, Vietnam--it’s a little early for that, but…?
Kriken: Well, Vietnam wasn’t there yet. I was very sympathetic to the protests against
the House Un-American Activities hearings. And then free speech,
22

although free speech really took off after I’d left. But I followed it during my
time in the military. I was drafted in the army almost immediately after getting
out of Berkeley. I think it was the crisis of the Berlin Wall. And that made even
more real whatever social awareness I had. I think most of us were just too
busy in the architecture program to get deeply involved in Berkeley politics.
One of my fellow students and best friends, named Mike Pease, did belong to a
group called Slate, and they embraced a lot of social causes in their work. And
through him I kind of kept up with it. Mike taught in the architecture program
at the University of Oregon.
Riess: Did you have friends outside the department? You bring up how busy you
were--and it sounds like it was isolating.
Kriken: It was. It was really isolating.
Riess: Did you work in teams?
Kriken: It was done on occasion; we would pair up, or something like that, and work
together.
Riess: That’s a good thing, isn’t it? Or not?
Kriken: Yes, it is.
23

Riess: Do you have a feeling about that, whether that’s something that needs to be
taught, you know, as one is edging towards being a professional?
Kriken: I absolutely do think that it’s very important to have that experience before
working outside the university. And I think it was really interesting to see how
ideas were modified, hopefully always for the better, by rubbing two different
points of view together. And so long as you had the good judgment to be able
to pick the best approach.
Riess: So was that happening?
Kriken: We did do that. And it was very balanced, like in our working drawings class I
did a project with Mike Pease, and it was a great project. I can show you a
picture of it sometime. Unfortunately, we spent most of our time on design and
not on doing construction documents. Because of this we did not do so well in
the class. But we had a hell of a good design. We were really proud of it.
Riess: Did you think of yourself that way, as someone who might be just doing
design, and somebody else would have to do the rest? An architect… I mean
it’s such a big bag of skills you have to have.
Kriken: When we talk about SOM, I’ll expand on this. It was like a major breakthrough
to see the advantages that SOM offered, because it did take away all
responsibilities for the hundreds of things you have to do besides designing.
And I often think about architects that have small firms, and the amount of
24

Riess: Yeah.
time they have to spend on subjects other than design; it would be more than
fifty percent, for sure.
Kriken: And then if you add promotional work, to get new business, it would get down
to about twenty percent that could be spent on design. So, [as students] we had
a feeling for the kind of quiet time to design, and then the time that we had to
present our ideas to other people, and have them review it, and then respond
to their reviews. They gave us a feeling for construction documents, making
the drawings to construct it, as opposed to thinking of the ideas in the first
place. There was something on business practice we had to learn, but it just
pales compared to what the reality is.
Riess: Structural engineering.
Kriken: Structural engineering and mechanical engineering, acoustical engineering. Let
me think.
Riess: How about the landscape?
Kriken: And landscape: we had landscape courses. Yes. All that.
Riess: Yeah, it’s a lot.
25

Kriken: And it never did get simpler either.
Riess: Okay. You told me that during the summers you worked as an ordinary
seaman on merchant ships, traveling to Tahiti, Pago Pago, Alaska, Dutch
Harbor, and the like. Those was college summers?
Kriken: Um-hmm. And it was something I had the privilege of doing, because my
father could get seaman’s papers for me. The maritime industry was
constricting, not expanding, so it was not an easy thing. But I am happy I
could.
Riess: What was your job on board ship?
Kriken: Well, there are two positions at the bottom--one is ordinary seaman, as it’s
called. And the other low- down term is wiper. And the wiper works in the
engine room, and basically cleans up and keeps everything oiled.
Riess: Were you a good sailor?
Kriken: Oh, I could do that part.
Riess: You didn’t get sick.
Kriken: Yes, I did get sick. But I really did enjoy the travel. And I don’t know, it just
gave me a feeling for what my father had been doing all those years, and
26

perhaps gave me a taste for my future travels. I never thought I would be
traveling as much as I have. But I guess the idea of constant movement became
a vague awareness after those experiences. And I did love going to those exotic
places as a young kid.
Riess: And did you get a sense of the laboring world--below decks?
Kriken: Oh yeah. And in our senior year at Berkeley, Wurster had a course he called
the Dean’s Tea course. And basically, all the senior class was brought together
in a seminar format; and each of us had to spend one of these sessions talking
about something other than architecture. And so I did…
Riess: Was it up at his house, by any chance?
Kriken: We had one session at his house. But mostly in what was called the “cork
Riess: The cork…
room,” under the library.
Kriken: Cork. It was actually a cork finish on the walls, for pinning up drawings. And
so I did one… This was I guess an expression of that romanticism I shared with
Okamoto, but I wrote a long poem of being onboard ship and going to Tahiti--
just one of those summers. And it’s somewhat embarrassing to think about
now… But anyway, those travels in the summer were important. I guess it was
about seeing places. I remember in Tahiti how beautiful the architecture was,
27

and how there was just enough European flavor that the French brought to
Tahiti. The buildings were beautiful because they had only shutters on the
openings; they had no glass because it was such a pleasant climate. The
buildings had a kind of sculptural quality because of the deep window
recesses. And the Polynesians and the Tahitians colored the buildings in a way
as only they could use color. They were bright tropical colors, and I always
thought that was such an interesting blend--it made it very unique. Oh, and
then along the waterfront of Papeete were sidewalk cafés and places for sitting
out in the open, looking over the harbor and all that, which is just idyllic.
Riess: Nice. Nice experience. Of course you could have gotten a summer construction
job.
Kriken: [laughter] I know.
Riess: Okay. You had to be drafted. I mean how did you feel about that? Did you
fight it? Did you consider conscientious objector status, or anything like that?
Kriken: Well, I did. And in those days, the only objector status available was if you
could prove you were Quaker. And I could not--I wanted to be a Quaker at that
point, but I wasn’t. I did protest, and I did go see the chaplains. And when I got
my assignment, I was made a medic.
Riess: Had you been brought up in any religious practice at all?
28

Kriken: Oh, a little bit. My parents, my mother’s side are Lutheran. One of her brothers
was a Lutheran minister. And I did grow up a little bit with that.
Riess: Was it important?
Kriken: No, not really. For some reason, I never did get into that. On my army dog tags
it said, “no preference.”
Riess: Lutheran is very strict.
Kriken: And at some point, I sort of separated with my parents on that perspective,
because they were devout. It was much of their social life--actually, for them it
was a way to be in touch with Norwegians, and a connection to home in
Norway. And in later years, but not when I was growing up, they would come
over to the Norwegian Seaman’s Church on Hyde Street to attend services
which were all in Norwegian.
Riess: That was a very strong community, the Norwegians.
Kriken: I don’t know, compared to other ethnic groups; but it was a community, and
they did have friends who were Scandinavian or Norwegian.
Riess: Aren’t they quick to clarify they’re Norwegian, not Danish, not Swedish? I
mean, Scandinavian…
29

Kriken: Yeah. They would make the distinction.
Riess: You went to boot camp at Fort Ord?
Kriken: Yes. And then I went to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio for the medical
training.
Riess: I’m interested in the people you met in San Antonio. You mentioned in your
Kriken: Oh yeah.
outline that that was important.
Riess: And were you married then? When did you get married?
Kriken: I got married the last year I was in the military. It was when I was stationed at
Fort Lewis in Washington.
Riess: You were in for a full two years.
Kriken: Yeah.
Riess: Okay. So you got the medic training.
Kriken: One of the, I guess you could say, really beneficial things that happened from
the military--which I hated--was that I did go to San Antonio, a place that in
30

my wildest dreams I’d never go. I mean I never imagined myself being there
because it’s far from the water and any ocean; all that part of the United States
was for me desert, cactus, and thorns. You know, it was not anything that
you’d particularly want to see. But I found a most interesting American city
which was four hundred years old, with pieces of architecture that dated back
to that time, and had an incredibly beautiful river that went through the
middle of it, that had been landscaped by WPA, not the whole thing, but a
piece of it. I met--a classmate’s mother whose name was Martha Mood, and she
was a famous ceramicist and tapist. In fact, I think the Museum of Modern Art
in New York had bought some of her pieces. Anyway, and so I looked her up,
at her daughter’s request, and I went to a party at her house. And it was the
most interesting group of people, especially after having been locked up in the
army and the architecture school for all those years. Because it was writers and
craftspeople, and architects and painters, and they would all socialize together.
And I thought, Jesus, this is really fun.
Riess: That’s interesting. After all, you had just come from the most interesting place
in the world, presumably.
Kriken: Yeah. Presumably. And so it was this interesting town, and this interesting
group of people. And the architect--and I met many architects including O’Neil
Ford, who was noted for a regional approach to Southwest architecture. But
Allison Peery is the one who particularly interested me. I can see, going
through this oral history, there may be some kind of a thread in my life that has
drawn me to people who are involved with life’s complexities. And the same
31

with Peery and his wife [Mimi], they were involved in Texas politics. And you
have to remember that there was a time when Texas politics was very populist;
Ralph Yarborough and Henry [B.] Gonzalez. All these people were cutting-
edge liberals. It was not the way we think of Texas politics today. While I was
at Fort Sam I would go in on weekends and work in Peery’s office, and it fun.
When I was getting out of the Army--and before Kennedy was shot in Dallas, I
wrote a note to Allison, and I said, “I’m getting out of the army. What’s going
on?” And he told me about some of the things that we had talked about before:
there were some big redevelopment projects in the downtown, and there was
this vague idea about a World’s Fair that the city was planning for later on, and
would I be interested in coming back and working on them? I’d had that prior
touchstone [in San Antonio] so I knew what it was, but I didn’t know what the
comparable opportunity was for the Bay Area--I really can’t fathom why I
chose to go there. I knew I was not going to stay there, but I thought I would go
and work on some of these projects, and eventually come back or do something
else. It wasn’t a life choice; it was just a choice for a few years, which is exactly
how it turned out.
Riess: Did you have in mind that you would be going to graduate school? Did you
have the GI Bill, or something like that?
Kriken: I did. And I thought about graduate school. And also I thought about how I
wanted to live on the East Coast, to get a feel for that. So I was hoping I could
combine the two at some point.
32

Riess: San Antonio… You said people from the psychedelic world came through?
Kriken: Yes.
Riess: It was Carlos Castaneda, and…
Kriken: Well, I don’t know that this should be in my oral history, but we did…
Riess: Oh, please.
Kriken: We did explore Castaneda’s use of peyote--which you could buy, by the way,
in any nursery in town.
Riess: In any nursery?
Kriken: The cactus, yeah, botanical nursery. I mean the cactus you could buy.
Riess: And who was doing it?
Kriken: Oh, college professors and artist friends.
Riess: It was this crowd that you’re talking about.
Kriken: Not all of them, but some of them would try it. And then later, when we were
working on the World’s Fair, and toward the end of my time there, a lot of
33

interesting people were visiting San Antonio. And a good friend was a writer
named Billy Lee Brammer. He wrote The Gay Place. He had been Lyndon
Johnson’s press secretary for many years. And he wrote a very famous first
book and was trying to do the next great book, and he had a very difficult time
trying to find the subject, or what his next effort would be. And it was kind of
natural, particularly at the time, that he would explore his creativity through
hallucinogenic drugs; and of course, we all found out later that drugs were
totally recreational, and that few people could create anything meaningful in
that state of mind. He knew Larry McMurtry in Houston; and Ken Kesey
would go to see Larry McMurtry and then would stop off and see Billy Lee on
his way back to California. So we would regularly be visited by the Merry
Pranksters. And that bus scene, and Neal Cassady, and the whole damn thing.
And then I had another set of friends, Gordon Ashby, a prominent designer
who used to be with the Charles Eames office, and was working on the Texas
exhibit for the fair. Gordon was very close to the Trips Festival happening in
San Francisco.
Riess: What’s the Trips Festival?
Kriken: The Trips Festival was one of the first acid trip parties. They had it down in the
Union Hall--the domed building at Fisherman’s Wharf.
Riess: Yeah. The Longshoreman’s Hall, or whatever it is.
34

Kriken: Longshoreman’s Hall. Gordon would come to San Antonio and say," You
[Tape 2: Side B]
know, we had search lights that people could aim and turn all over the city.
And we had trampolines and strobe lights, so people looked like they were
suspended in the air.” And he was going through all these happenings in
music and art. And I knew something exciting was going on in California,
while I was in Texas.
Riess: [The Gay Place is] a political novel?
Kriken: Yeah, it is. It’s supposed to be a fictional portrait of Lyndon Johnson, but
people who knew Lyndon say it’s the best portrait of Lyndon Johnson that
anyone has ever put on paper. And there were movie rights for that book that
had been in the offing, and the story goes that Lyndon basically not only
bought the movie rights so that no movie could ever be made, but also, black-
balled Billy in every conceivable way. And so Billy was struggling with that.
Riess: Yeah. Well, interesting. San Antonio.
Kriken: I still have very good, dear friends from that time that I’m in touch with. And
San Antonio certainly opened me up to the idea that there are many wonderful
places to live besides my beautiful California. And I also thought a lot about
the impact on design by different cultures and climates; San Antonio was very
much warmer than San Francisco, and so how does this reflect in its
architecture? This was a time when electricity would overcome any difficulties
35

of temperature variation. But you really could see, particularly in the older
buildings, how a hot climate was overcome by design. Many years later, I
worked for Sim van der Ryn, who was state architect during Governor Jerry
Brown’s time. Sim wanted to do a “green” new capitol area plan. I was
convinced that many of the answers for a non-energy-based climate treatment
were known. For hundreds, if not thousands of years, people have lived
without electricity, and they found a way to overcome climate difficulties. They
had porches, they had attics, and they let the wind blow through, and it
worked. Sim and I would argue about this, and of course he won; he was my
client. His idea was that the buildings had to be really thrilling, like a space
ship, or a geodesic dome, or something that people would equate to the future.
And I had all these images from San Antonio in my head--many answers can
be found in architecture built before electricity.
Riess: He wanted something totally new.
Kriken: I don’t want to state with certainty that I knew what Sim was thinking, but my
memory is that Sim thought we had to put forward very high technology,
modern imagery, to match the goals of the program. I remember having these
arguments. And I did sketches of buildings that were low-rise, and were mixed
use, were transportation sensitive, used trees to shade, and overhangs and
attics to absorb the heat from the sun. And he hated it. He felt that would
defeat the program, from the point of view of getting public attention around
what he wanted to do. He was probably right, in that way. Now I really don’t
care. I mean I think you can do it both ways or in combination.
36

Riess: That’s very interesting. I don’t know when the book came out, Architecture
Without Architects, but I think a lot of people were very taken with it. Do you
remember that?
Kriken: I’m sure I have it somewhere here. Yeah, I thought that was a very profound
book too.
Riess: In DeMars’s housing there was an awareness of solar issues. And also
Esherick’s. There were people paying attention to this, for sure. It’s amazing
that it’s still an uphill battle, and interesting that Sim van der Ryn felt it had to
be introduced through a modern look, or whatever.
Kriken: Sim also wanted a twenty-four hour mixed use neighborhood instead of a
single office use, active only from eight to five. We discovered that all the
building programs for state office use--I mean virtually all, not all could be
defined in departmental units of about sixty thousand square feet. That would
be three floors of a typical office building. So we could think of each block
divided into four parcels; and one part could be housing, and one part could be
office--or maybe two parts. But in any case, they would always be mixed; no
single use would be predominant, they would always be a mix in every block.
Sim liked that idea. Nevertheless, the very first building out of the chute was a
full-block state office building. And so this concept lasted for the time we had
doing the plan, and then they built a number of half-block buildings. What
they were doing prior to our involvement was closing streets to make two-
37

lock units of office buildings. So maybe we got the state down to a one-block
size. No more closing streets.
Riess: Okay. You said in your notes to me that you were determined to continue your
career with “city-scale” work.
Kriken: There were times in my career where I had the sense that I had to work at this
city-scale. And one was just in my last years at UC Berkeley, I felt so much
more engaged in dealing with all the pieces of the city together: transportation,
density, open space, mix of uses, and the like. I came to believe that it was in
the way you combined these parts that you made new places, rather than
trying to invent something completely new. Jose Luis Sert, who was dean at
Harvard, said to our class, “the bedroom hasn’t changed that much in three
thousand years. It’s a smallish room with probably a window you can look out,
to see the sunrise.” And there are a lot of things like that. They are the way they
are because of the human scale and size of human hands and the speed of
walking: they really do remain the same. This theme always comes to my
mind, it’s just how you put known things together in different ways that can
produce new insights into the problems we are working on.
Riess: That’s a good reminder. You applied to Harvard for graduate school. Did you
consider any other places?
Kriken: It was another probably very naïve thing compared to what people do today,
but it was the only school I applied to. I got a letter of support from Don Olsen
38

and some people from San Antonio. The first thing [that] impressed me about
Harvard was the difference in students between Berkeley and the GSD
[Graduate School of Design].
Riess: Oh yes. And how would you characterize that?
Kriken: At the GSD, all the students were very talented, but the most distinguishing
quality was their ambition. At Berkeley, you would probably say the range of
talent was wider. I mean there were probably a few people at Berkeley who
were out-of-this-world talented, and some who weren’t as talented. It was just
more mixed. The GSD seems to have screened out any possibility of variant
from very ambitious, very competitive, and very strong people. And they
seemed to be more prepared for practice than I felt.
Riess: You had been in practice, in a way.
Kriken: Yeah. They just seemed more confident than I was. Moving to Boston, I could
sense there were cultural differences. Actually, one of the most interesting
things about living in the Boston area was the difficulty people had in having
casual friendships. They really had trouble with it. You could be at a grocery
store and you see the checker, and say, “Hi. Nice day,” or something like that.
And I would see their face freeze, and look around, and maybe they should call
the police or something. Because that kind of exchange was not normal.
39

Riess: And did that happen among the students, do you think? And was it harder to
break in?
Kriken: The students were fine. It was just the outside world. And I’m sure the outside
world was tired of dealing with a new batch of students every year; they’re
probably numbed after a while. But people weren’t taking pleasure in
themselves, like we do here in the West, unless they felt they could be your
deep and life-long friend. That was the only possibility of a relationship you
could have with someone who lived there more permanently.
Riess: How did you settle in? I mean you were married. Did you have children?
Kriken: No.
Riess: Did you have an apartment? And your wife had a job?
Kriken: We had an apartment. This was my first marriage - Anne Girard worked for
the Cambridge Redevelopment Agency.
Riess: So she was in the same…
Kriken: She went to school at UC Berkeley and graduated as an English major and
could write very well. And she was a librarian, and she… But anyway, the
Cambridge Redevelopment Agency was a first step in a career that kept
40

evolving for her, until she became a partner in a very prominent planning firm
here in San Francisco, which was Marshall Kaplan, Ganz, and Kahn--MKGK.
Riess: Boston felt like it was more business--ambition?
Kriken: Well, yeah. And there were various expressions. A dear friend of mine today,
Jan Wampler, was a rising star in our field. And he was working for the Boston
Redevelopment Agency on the Bicentennial plans for Boston. That’s the 1976
Bicentennial. Both Boston and Philadelphia were competing to have a World’s
Fair kind of event for this purpose. Later our government decided every city
would have some way of celebrating it, rather than having it focused in one of
the two historic cities. I met Jan for the first time at a party--I later worked for
him, but at the party I said, “Jan, I’ve heard about your Bicentennial project for
the BRA, and you may know that I’ve been the chief designer of the HemisFair
in San Antonio. He said something like, “Yes, I’ve heard about it, or looked at
it, and I think it’s terrible.” And I was just speechless. This--almost the first
words out of your mouth, putting the other party on the defensive. But you
had to get used to that, because that’s a style of communicating, or sort of
setting up a relationship. Anyway, it was the first time that I was hit over the
head. And later I learned better how to avoid this.
Riess: It was some sort of way of setting up a relationship, putting your cards on the
table. Did you figure out what that was all about?
41

Kriken: I actually got together with him, and he got over whatever that was that he was
trying to position…
Riess: So it’s sort of like a male animal thing?
Kriken: It is. Probably it is. And anyway, we had a good time. I worked there for about
six months. I don’t think I really know the arc of his career, but he later was
teaching at MIT. And I think he is to this day, and he’s also very involved in
China work.
Riess: The people at GSD were Sert, and--Gropius was there, wasn’t he?
Kriken: No. No, Gropius had been dean and was with The Architects Collaborative
[TAC] in Cambridge.
Riess: But that was a big influence, or legacy?
Kriken: I think the GSD in those days was still turned strongly toward Europe and the
International Style. And Sert may have been the last of that. After Sert the next
dean was a professor from the business school named Kilbridge,
Kriken: Oh, I should tell you: the GSD experience turned out to be very special, because
six of us were picked from our class to work on a grant that Sert had received,
to explore the idea for a high-density suburban city. And it was called the New
Communities Project.
42

Riess: That was in your first year?
Kriken: This was for the whole time I was there. So we worked in this wonderful
Cambridge house, and it was full of expertise in different subjects of urban
design and planning. People from MIT and the professors from GSD would
meet with us. So it really maxed out that experience in a way I never could
have imagined. And also, of course, it tipped me completely into the subject
that became my life’s work.
Riess: Was it a built thing ever?
Kriken: It was done for Housing and Urban Development. The site was located in
Riess: It’s a city?
suburban Massachusetts; I think the Lowell area. It was really done as a sort of
a prototypical study, to try to identify what would be the advantages,
monetarily, socially, in the use of time, in developing a way of living outside
major cities that would be walkable and denser than what the current pattern
was. Actually, see that drawing there, on the wall? That’s Jose Sert’s drawing of
my part of this city as we were developing it.
Kriken: It’s a city. It’s freestanding. It actually was at a highway intersection. It’s
housing, work, shopping, entertainment. It’s a mix of low- and mid-rise
buildings. After I joined Skidmore, I was given a new town to design. And
having gone through this project at the GSD armed me, in terms of the pieces
43

of information you had to put together and understand, so that I wasn’t fearful
of doing a project as big as a new city. The Harvard city was for a hundred
thousand, and my first new city was for a hundred and fifty thousand. So, I felt
I had a way to approach it.
Riess: Was this a big idea then, the building of new cities?
Kriken: At this time, in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, there were a lot of projects called New
Town, and New Town-In Town. There were a lot more national, federal monies
to catalyze, explore, and study city problems. Another project I did with
Skidmore was looking at transportation improvements in downtowns, as a
prototypical study that could be applied to all cities. It was called the Center
City Transportation Project and we looked at five or six cities. My city was
Dallas. It was exciting to be in this subject area of cities. We were developing
design theory and public policy. A lot of my early work was very theoretical
and a continuing part of my learning about cities.
Riess: Theoretical in that these were studies.
Kriken: These were studies to create policy. Like another project I did, which I hope we
will talk more about later, it was a very simple idea: we need national land use
policy. No state, region, or city takes responsibility for the lands between cities.
We believed that national investments in infrastructure, including highways,
could be used to guide development to environmentally positive locations.
44

[Tape 3: Side A]
Riess: What was the name of this?
Kriken: I call it just generally the Infrastructure for National Land Use Policy.
Riess: It sounds terrible, offhand. I’m really interested.
Kriken: Well, to duplicate something I said before, the lands between our cities are
subject to sprawl. Cities are competitive with each other, and there’s no
planning for these open lands between our cities.
Riess: And those are the parks, and those are the…
Kriken: Ideally, they would be the parks. But they are also, the cities like Stockton and
the 580 corridor, they’re being badly managed. People are living in flood
plains; they’re developing on scenic lands, on agriculture lands. It’s just
whoever can patch the property together, the project is built. And because
cities can’t really get together the money to build infrastructure, or put that
together until there is a demand, we get these crazy quilt suburban patterns,
and very often similarly ill-advised infrastructure supporting them. And the
theory was what if we had an idea about where we should locate settlement,
where it would not be harmful to agriculture land, not be in the path of
wildfires or floods. And we could use the federal investments, or the state
investments for that matter, some combination of state and federal investment
in infrastructure to become incentives to attract people to settle or develop in
45

one positive place versus another disruptive place. It was an ingenious idea
that I worked on with Jerry Goldberg. And I’m still working on it to this day.
But these were all kind of wonderful, early experiences, working at this scale.
This is national land use plan; it can’t get any bigger than that.
Riess: That’s very interesting.
Kriken: And then we did the California Tomorrow Plan for Alf Heller’s organization in
that same time period. And that was fascinating because that was all about (in
my mind, anyway), finding ways to define choices for people, and so that
people didn’t think everything was inevitable; that there was a way you could
pick one direction and know its consequences, versus another direction. And
so when we did the California Tomorrow Plan. We had “Today’s California,” and
then we had present trends extended in California. And then we also defined
an alternative future, which, of course, was a green future, and kind of a
socialist delight, our collective fantasy of what California could be. And we
tried to show where the policy variations would be in that. Are you familiar
with this?
Riess: California Tomorrow, I’m not sure when it happened.
Kriken: This was in the early ‘70s. If I can take this off for just a second… [Kriken
retrieves documents] We had this on the newsstand, the California Tomorrow
Plan, right next to Rolling Stone magazine.
46

Riess: I didn’t realize it came like that, a newsprint publication.
Kriken: We have a book too. Anyway, I helped organize this thinking, and then had
even more fun because I did all these little cartoon drawings to illustrate life in
a California that continues today’s policies and a California that is more
sustainable. In the positive California future we map land that’s subject to
hazards such as earthquakes, floods, and fires, then agricultural land, forested
land, habitat, steep slopes, and deserts. So we’d say, on all of this land, would
only allow building under conditions that did not harm its purpose or value.
Finally you remove the existing urbanized land, because that’s already built
upon. And what you have left are slivers of land we called regional land
reserves. If we focus our new development here, we can protect all the rest.
Instead of looking at all of the state’s land as equally available to develop
whatever we will with, we were applying the federal land use philosophy to
California. We also described a negative future. This illustrated how present
trends continued ultimately destroy California’s livability and quality of life.
Riess: You are trying to direct people to read something in the way you want them to
read it, through graphics.
Kriken: It’s very intricate, I mean the way we had to set it up in terms of: this is
California today, this is California in the future with no change, and this is a
healthy California future and what needs to happen to get there.
Riess: Did it pop off the newsstands? I mean did people get it?
47

Kriken: We had three publications. We had a paperback book that came after this.
There was a conference that came after the publication of this. And Marc
Goldstein was the director. You’re going to be interviewing him. He can tell
you a lot about this, too. Jerry Goldberg worked on it. Here, take this if you
would like to take the plan to read.
Riess: I’d love to. I’d really love to.
Kriken: It’s, by now, old and has been getting beat up.
Riess: I’ll try not to beat it up any more. It’s not your only copy, is it?
Kriken: No, it’s not. I still have a few left.
Riess: All right. Okay.
Kriken: So we finished that, did we?
Riess: For now. And I would feel maybe we had finished with the GSD, except you
didn’t talk about several of the people there that perhaps you have memories
of, like Willo Von Moltke.
Kriken: Oh, Willo Von Moltke was the head of the urban design program. And he was
from Germany and had worked in Philadelphia before coming to Harvard. He
was a wonderful, caring man. And his wife was a concert pianist. I was once
48

invited for dinner and afterward she introduced me to the music of Scott
Joplin. He was a wonderful, soft, thoughtful person. He had grace.
Riess: Kevin Lynch.
Kriken: Oh, Kevin Lynch. I’m glad to be reminded. I took a course from him called
“City Design.” In many ways, he was very important for me. He had an idea
that we should think about cities in relation to their sensory qualities, as well as
the functional. He really didn’t like function-based problem solving. Some
people believe that the decision-making process defines the solution. There are
all kinds of approaches that people use for problem solving. His was to try to
figure out a way to describe problem solving that is opening, not closing, in
seeking city livability.
Riess: What’s an example?
Kriken: Okay. An example would be: In a good city, it’s easy to get around especially
on foot. A good city provides diversity. It communicates visual variety and
choice. A livable city has a unique sense of place and identity. It also has open
space to balance its hardscape. These are a few of many qualities we associate
with livable cities.
Riess: Are old cities, by definition, good cities?
49

Kriken: Well, I guess it depends. You could use several ways of thinking about it,
because it also has to do with a fine grain mix of uses that in Jane Jacobs’s
terms would be very adaptable and resilient to change. So I guess most older
cities have that quality. They were not shopping centers. Anyway, in the
broadest possible way, he brought that to the class, and in his books he called it
the “normative theory of city design.” And I always loved it. Mainly he
provided a way to talk about cities that is not like solving an engineering
problem. You talk about it in ways that have to do with the quality of living
there, not just infrastructure, mechanical things, or decision-making methods,
but the qualities.
Riess: Did you have lectures at GSD from Kevin Lynch?
Kriken: No, but I dutifully, did go over to MIT and visit his class. He had a seminar.
There were about ten of us.
Riess: So he wasn’t at GSD.
Kriken: He did come over. But he was a professor with MIT.
Riess: You know, I’m going to wear a bulky jacket next time I come here, speaking of
livability! It’s cold.
Kriken: [walking away] I thought it got a little cold too. It’s 65.
[End of Tape 3; Tape 3: Side B is blank]
50

[Tape 4: Side A]
Riess: Last time we were talking about blasting away part of the Marin hills to make a
new area to develop. It was proposed by an undergraduate named Don Royse.
Kriken: Yes. And he was a classmate. And his thesis--this particular piece of work you
refer to completely represented the mindset of our time in the early ‘60s, when
the thought was that nature was just something to be re-shaped for human
purposes, and almost anything was a fair subject for change.
Riess: Several other things interested me from last time, and I just want to fill in a bit
more. You said that the AIA had placed an ad in Life magazine. Was that what
you said?
Kriken: I believe that it was a full-page ad that was something Life magazine regularly
did around careers by describing different career directions.
Riess: That Life regularly did?
Kriken: Yes. It could have been a promotion by AIA; I cannot remember, except that I
remember reading it and thinking to myself that I did like making things, as
I’ve said repeatedly. I never thought I would necessarily be making buildings,
but I liked making things. And there was an allusion to that, and to being
artistically aware, having some talent artistically, as well as math. And it turns
out that’s pretty much true, although in my career, I must say I’ve never really
been pressed very hard on the math side.
51

Riess: I guess it was more a time when people took aptitude tests. I don’t know
whether that still happens. And then you found out what your career--what
you really were gifted in. But you already knew.
Kriken: Yeah, I already knew.
Riess: Yes. When you were in the army, and you were doing your medic training,
were you also sketching--I mean, do you always draw?
Kriken: Yes. Actually I did quite a lot of artwork while I was in the army. For a while I
was an ambulance driver, and I made a beautiful portrait of my ambulance that
I’ll show you sometime. And then I did, surprisingly, watercolors and other
works on paper, even though I hadn’t really become super serious about
watercolors. I’m serious about watercolors now; serious as a hobby, not as a
commercial watercolor artist, but just enjoying painting.
Riess: And enjoying that medium, enjoying the wash of color rather than just lines.
Kriken: Yeah, exactly. I think, in a way, I had a very strong mindset when I was in the
Riess: Enrichment?
military that I was going to try to take as much time as I could for my own--I
don’t want to say pleasure, but my own mental health.
52

Kriken: …enrichment maybe, benefit--yes, something like that. So I really did make an
effort to do painting and sketching and ink drawings all through the time I was
in the military.
Riess: Actually, if you were getting medic training, were you learning anatomy?
Kriken: I was. And it horrified me. We did have anatomy courses, you know, where
you see the muscle and bone and organs, as well. And for some reason, I’m
quite squeamish about that kind of thing. We had to take blood and give shots,
and it was always done with a certain amount of anxiety on my part. If you
ever had to take blood from a dark-skinned person who was kind of heavy-
armed, you cannot see the vein, and there was no bump where a vein might be.
And you just had to go blind into the person’s arm. And if you missed, the look
you got from the other person was enough to kill. And sometimes I wondered
if I could be seriously harmed by the patient.
Riess: So it didn’t get better, in other words.
Kriken: No. No, it didn’t get better. I didn’t get better at it, and it didn’t feel better
either.
Riess: You were fascinated by Al and Mimi Peery’s commitment to art and social
causes, and civic life, and national and local politics. But I don’t think you said
what was going on.
53

Kriken: There were certainly things going on in San Antonio, in terms of local politics
and bond measures for some of the projects that I was working on. And the
requirement for national and international approvals for this category II
World’s Fair called HemisFair ’68.
Riess: What does that mean, a category II World’s Fair?
Kriken: A category II World’s Fair is like the Seattle fair, and like the New Orleans fair.
It means that the host city/country provides spaces for the foreign pavilions, as
opposed to the foreign countries building their own pavilions. You provide
space to exhibit whatever it is they want to show, in terms of their country.
Riess: And was it newly-built space in San Antonio?
Kriken: Yes, it was. Although there were, in fact, quite a few buildings that were part of
a historic German--we call it the King William neighborhood… Kaiser
Wilhelmstrasse was the name before World War II, and they made it King
William Street.
Riess: That is interesting.
Kriken: And so in some ways I got this feel for the meaning and importance of historic
buildings, in the context of doing contemporary work. Just to jump back for a
minute: I talked to you about the river as being such an important natural
feature for San Antonio. And the river, as you know, is very curvilinear,
54

winding--just very picturesque and charming; and generally the buildings that
faced the river are the simple brick and stone back faces of older buildings.
And it just lends a charm and character that is unmatched in terms of what you
could do if it were all new. And of course there are many new pieces now
along the river. But this historic framework is really wonderful.
Riess: I just know the tourist part, the River Walk, but is its whole course curvilinear?
Kriken: The whole course is curvilinear. There’s one kind of horseshoe-shaped loop
that was designed and redeveloped by the WPA, and it’s one of the nicest
pieces of townscape in the entire United States. It would rank very well with
any place in the world, I think. And what we did is, of course, we worked on
that. When I was working with Al and Mimi, they designed the Jim Cullum
Jazz Club--he plays Dixieland jazz, and it was the first entertainment venue
built on the river, when I was there in the military.
Riess: You developed it?
Kriken: Well, I didn’t design or develop it. While I was at the office, this was being
done. It was exciting, because it was the first new public destination at the
river’s edge.
Riess: Getting the permits, having to deal with permitting things. You said--you were
talking about the local and national politics issue.
55

Kriken: Oh, yeah. Because everything that’s done at a scale like this can’t happen just
because I think it’s nice, or a few people think it’s nice, but we have to almost
always convince a whole lot of people that it’s the right thing to do. So, even
before you think about building permits, and all those kinds of more technical
things, there is the need to find the approach to create a consensus in a
community, to gain the political support and the citizen’s support for a
particular idea of what to do. So maybe when I talk about politics, to some
degree I’m always thinking about--let me start over here--I don’t think about it
as a political persuasion or power kind of thing, I think of it as just making
very strong and engaging arguments for why something should be one way
versus another way. So it’s not quite the way I would define politics. But it’s
part of that background.
Riess: And that’s where you were first doing it.
Kriken: Um-hmm, definitely San Antonio. When I was there in the army, and then
when I came back and worked for three or four years, those were my first times
definitely dealing with that issue. And beginning to think about how you
present something very complicated to a very diverse audience who has very
different interests, taking them through a kind of logic of choices, and then
leading to a kind of comprehensive, interrelated whole at the end of it. For
example, you might first talk about use, then circulation, then massing--how it
fits, how it relates to the context, positively relates to the context--a whole
series of things. And each one is a story, separate, and each one is a story that
relates to the whole. And you’re sort of building these, like bricks, that all come
56

together and make the final picture. Part of that, I should have said earlier, is
how it can contribute in terms of its amenity value, or its financial importance,
or its job-attracting importance--all of those different things enter into this kind
of discussion.
Riess: It’s a really interesting thing to remember. When I’ve talked to people who’ve
been, like, presidents and dealing with boards, or whatever, they always say
that they have all their people lined up ahead of time. There are never any
surprises, even though you are ostensibly presenting it, you’ve already got it in
your pocket?
Kriken: That isn’t… I’ve never felt that way. [laughter] I always feel like--I’ll give you an
example, which is a little bit out of sequence. In the case of the Transbay
Terminal in San Francisco, we presented a neighborhood that would surround
the Transbay terminal, that was much higher-density than what San
Franciscans normally would support. In fact, it was a bit in conflict with the
existing zoning and planning ordinance, which required all the tall buildings of
the downtown area to be stair-stepping down to lower and lower and lower as
you got out to the fringe. So in this instance we said we must take advantage of
this transportation facility, which within two blocks connects to anywhere in
the Bay Area, ultimately Los Angeles and Sacramento and San Jose. It has the
most transit access of any place in the Bay Area, and maybe in the whole state
of California. So we said it should be high density and it should serve many
people. San Francisco is about many things, but three, I think, are most
important to its citizens. One is a sense of diversity and variety. We don’t make
57

projects with repetitive building types. Second, the city is always interested in
views. And so if you’re going to do a high-density neighborhood, how can you
organize the tall buildings in such a way that they can still promote views--not
only from the new buildings, but also from the existing buildings? New
buildings should not wall off city views. The third concern is sunlight and open
space: because it’s a cold city, sun is very important and defines the location
and height of buildings. So, the argument of density was very clear: it’s a high-
density, transit-based neighborhood. But then the argument of how to do it so
that we could create variety, views, sun-filled open spaces, and a social heart
along Folsom Street.
Riess: Is that a term in common use?
Kriken: No, that’s one we use a lot. I started using that at UC Merced, when we were
Riess: That’s nice.
doing little Main Street.
Kriken: But anyway, we decided the taller buildings had to be slender, very slender.
And we would even say--if you had a single wide building, we’d say, Cut it in
half, and then stack one half on the other so there’d be a slender tower. And in
that way it didn’t obstruct views; it didn’t cast big shadows on parks, and it
also, in my mind, helped make more welcoming that east/southeast side of the
city, which because of the twist of Market Street--I’m getting way too long here,
but--the shift of the street grid at Market Street, and the even stepping down of
58

uilding heights, seemed wall-like, not full of light and sparkling like the other
side of the city, with the Transamerica Tower and other towers standing free
against the sky. And so planned, these taller slender towers create a similar
silhouette for that side of the city.
Riess: So how to sell this?
Kriken: And so those arguments were the step-by-step way of presenting it so that it fit
what most people are anxious about. And even people from San Francisco
Tomorrow were supportive [phone rings]
[brief interruption in recording]
Kriken: That [Transbay Transit Centerl proposal] was just a few years ago, so we’ve
made a big jump in time.
Riess: You were saying it’s never easy.
Kriken: Yeah, every project, you try to find arguments that are as simple and strong as
the ones I’ve just mentioned to you. I could probably think of some more
examples, but… In the case of San Antonio, going back to that for a minute, we
didn’t have to argue about the importance of the river to the community.
Everybody understood that.
Riess: Was the Army Corps of Engineers in the story?
59

Kriken: Yes, they were. Just a couple of quick comments about San Antonio River. The
city was not economically diverse; it was basically being supported by two,
maybe three, huge military bases. And everybody in San Antonio thought that
was not a healthy situation. And probably many notches below that was
tourism as a possible source of their economic future. So, in a series of steps
over time, the idea of the World’s Fair was hatched as a way to have the Fair,
but also to build a convention center, an arena, a theater complex, hotels, and
other things that would begin to strengthen the ability for the city to attract this
kind of new market. It was a very big strategy. Now I had nothing to do with
creating the idea of the World’s Fair--I was the chief designer for the World’s
Fair, but I didn’t think of the idea. A few years later, after the World’s Fair, and
they had these new facilities, there was still the sense that downtown was
declining. And people were moving out. It was still seen as a place of crime
and not safe. Anyway, there was very little new happening except for the
Army Corps of Engineers flood control project, which was to channelize this
river that had been the source of so much of the community’s pride and sense
of its unique identity. In this time of anxiety about the future, to keep the ball
moving in the right direction, people were coming up with an idea every
month. It was, Let’s do a ballpark one month. Let’s do a museum the next. Let’s
do a… You know, it was one thing after another after another. Each new idea
was seen as in somebody’s interest, but not in everybody’s interest, until they
said, Let’s do the river. It’s the one thing that everybody was excited about and
could get behind. And then that became the focus. And the Army Corps flood
control project was expanded to include beautification, retaining the existing
beauty of the river outside of this downtown river horseshoe bend. This was
60

the time I became involved as an SOM designer for the River Corridor Study.
We worked with a number of San Antonio citizens. Notable among them were
Cy and Sherry Wagner. I worked with Cy and Sherry on the HemisFair project
but the river corridor was our finest collaboration. The plan has been a great
success and continues to attract office and residential buildings, open space,
and museums to the river’s edge. It’s been a kind of a multiplier that’s gone on
and on.
Riess: Does the San Antonio River go down through the missions--those wonderful
old missions?
Kriken: It does, in the southern part of the city. Although I think the missions
themselves had what they called acequias, which were small irrigation
channels that lead away from the river. They have the acequias as they were
built probably four hundred years [ago], or something like that.
Riess: I’m amazed that people kept their hands off that mission area. Maybe it’s a
different jurisdiction, so you never could have touched it.
Kriken: I don’t know the story on that. But I know that there’s a couple of groups of
citizens that are very watchful over historic places. This is the story of the San
Antonio Conservation Society, which is to this day a powerful preservation
force in the city. But basically, the body politic in the town, before the WPA
preservation, was that the city was going to divert the river and make it a
service corridor for trucks. And these women got together and made a puppet
61

show. It’s so wonderful. They made a puppet show to protest the city’s
proposal, and they prevailed and the WPA river beautification began.
Riess: What did the puppet show show?
Kriken: I think they used the puppets to tell the history of the river. It was such an
[Tape 4: Side B]
unusual way to approach the subject.
Riess: So how did you decide to move on from San Antonio? Maybe you’d exhausted
its possibilities?
Kriken: I have to say I had still two things I really wanted. One, I knew I was going to
come back to California. And the other was that I wondered whether I could
find a way to live on the East Coast for a time, just to get a feel for it. And so it
wasn’t so much whether I was going to leave, it was just when. And this really
comes up later, but it was an unusual time for a young architect. It was a
buyer’s market because there was such a scarcity of people, and you always felt
like you could move on into some other situation that would be equally
challenging in some way.
Riess: Really. It was a good time for architects.
Kriken: It was.
62

Riess: And was it more your particular skill, do you think? Or even the design people
could find work?
Kriken: Well, in my area, there was a total vacuum. The area that I was trying to define
for myself, which was this larger scale work called urban design.
Riess: And in defining it for yourself, did you--it’s such a loaded question, I don’t
want to make it a yes, no question--were you thinking of how you could do
something that was good for the world? Did you think about the greater good?
Kriken: Yes. It is about making positive changes. I think that even at the beginning of
my career, I thought that working at this scale, if you could find people
interested in the future at that scale, it did benefit communities and had a social
purpose. I liked the idea of enhancing San Antonio’s economic base by some
design work I was doing.
Riess: So that’s a very powerful message.
Kriken: It was. It was a powerful motive for me.
Riess: And in selling something to the variety of people--we’ve been talking about the
politics end of it. But the visual: how important is the visual?
Kriken: Well, the visual is very important, because probably my favorite principle
about designing cities is maintaining the unique identity of a place, a
63

neighborhood, whatever scale you’re working at. And while the identity might
have a lot of attributes, the part that I enjoyed thinking about the most is the
physical, visual manifestation.
Riess: What I also meant was, when you go to sell your idea, you can sort of
overwhelm your audience with charts and models and things like that, so that
they’re starry-eyed. And I’m just thinking about the marketing end of it, and
how you got, and have gotten, smarter and smarter about that, and what’s at
work there.
Kriken: Well, I think there is potentially always a kind of a “gee whiz” factor, by
explaining something that takes in a larger context than most people consider
when they think about change.
Riess: Most people can’t understand the picture that you put in front of them, right? I
mean it takes some training to read a plan.
Kriken: One of the things I’ve learned, and it is unique, I think, is using almost a
cartoon-like diagram method which piece-by-piece builds up to a
comprehensive plan illustrated by models or aerial perspectives and eye-level
perspectives. But each idea is going to be captured in a very simple diagram.
And I think most people get it. Sometimes I only show the selected version.
But, earlier in the process, I show what the choices are so our clients can have
greater comfort about taking a particular position versus another position.
Hopefully I’ve shown them the available alternatives. This is one of the hardest
64

things to teach young architects, because coming out of school they’re trained
to assert their own and only their own position. Even in my own teaching at
Berkeley I have a hard time making the students do these little diagrams
showing what the choices are. Everybody is so conditioned to simply manifest
the one idea they have, the idea that they come up with. We have to convey
this idea that it’s our responsibility to educate our clients by showing choices
and why one might work better than the other, or listen to people give you the
opposite point of view. Another reason I like to do these diagrams of parts is
that if you show the whole solution, somebody will not like some part that for
you may not even be important, but they won’t like some part, and they’ll dash
the whole plan. So I’d rather have them talk about the small piece they don’t
like, and not get it confused with what comes out as a totality at the end. Do
you follow that?
Riess: That makes everything negotiable, in a way.
Kriken: Everything, you take it apart for them and show them the pieces, and what the
choices are. I learn. I don’t know everything. The only thing I bring to the table
is my ability to take the problem apart so that they can evaluate the decisions. I
remain open to change if there’s new information, and typically there is.
Riess: It seems consistent with how architects legendarily work, that you are
designing up to the very last minute, and when the bell rings, that’s what you
have. So there were iterations of something maybe a few steps back that aren’t
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necessarily worse. Is that true? Or do you think that the final product is always
best?
Kriken: By now in my career, I do have fairly clear ideas about how it’s going to turn
out. In my earlier career I was following the process. But now I do have ideas
that are in the back of my mind. I can early on sketch something that would be
pretty close to a very good solution.
Riess: You can see it in the back of your mind. You don’t need paper and pencil to
realize it.
Kriken: Yes, but I can draw it too.
Riess: Yeah.
Kriken: But I say this because, you just can’t help it. Whatever sort of preconception I
might have about how something might turn out, that, to me, is just like a
safety net. I enjoy discovery more than anything. And I would rather not fall
back on that preconception. But if nothing better emerged out of the process,
then I would always have that [drawing] as a [safety net].
Riess: So this is the mature architect speaking.
Kriken: Um-hmm. This is after--I didn’t feel that way when I was in San Antonio, by
any means.
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Riess: Okay. Now, your plan was to go back to California, or go to the East Coast.
Kriken: Right.
Riess: I don’t want to derail this too much, but what were you thinking about for the
East Coast? What would be back there? Boston? New York? Individuals?
Kriken: While I’d done a lot of traveling, I had not ever lived on the East Coast. I’d
visited, but I’d never lived there. I wanted that feeling of the seasons, and you
know, just what people go through there. It probably did occur to me that I
would meet some of my peers there, and that it would be nice to have some
kind of a network of friends that also extended to the East Coast.
Riess: You made the point that it would have been easy to find a job.
Kriken: Yeah.
Riess: In any case, you decided to come back to California. But first you stopped at
Washington University.
Kriken: I stopped at Washington University to teach. I can’t remember who called me.
There was a professor named Roger Montgomery who had been teaching there
for many years and then went to UC Berkeley. And he was the one that hired
me. I told him I was just planning to teach for a semester, plus the summer.
This was my first teaching experience.
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Riess: Roger Montgomery was an urban designer, wasn’t he?
Kriken: He became, ultimately, dean at UC Berkeley. He was very well known, famous,
in public housing policy. He was a good critic of urban design and architecture.
Riess: In ’62 he became the first urban designer for the U.S. Housing and Home
Kriken: Yeah.
Finance Agency, forerunner of H.U.D.
Riess: That wasn’t quite your cup of tea though, was it?
Kriken: People like Roger, with his background, are a constant source of interest to me.
His professional life was in this other world. When he was a teacher, it wasn’t
about public policy; when he was teaching, it was about urban design and city
planning. Anyway, I used to see him quite a lot socially, when I came back to
San Francisco.
Riess: You said he was a critic, as if that was a special skill. Aren’t we all critics? But
he was a really good critic? Constructive critic?
Kriken: He was a tough critic. People at Washington University had stories that they
would tell about his design reviews. He made them all fearful. It was a tough
school. Roger had to change his way to merge with the California style of
teaching, which is not quite as tough-minded as what we used to hear about at
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Washington University. But anyway, he was a fascinating man. One of the first
trips when I came back to San Francisco in 1970 was to visit the Osaka World’s
Fair with Roger, some faculty members, and students. We went with families,
wives, and spouses. And of course he knew that I’d worked on both the Boston
Bicentennial and then San Antonio’s HemisFair. Before I decided to become an
urban designer, I thought there might be the possibility of working in a more
continuous way designing large festivals and world’s fairs. I learned a lot from
my friends who were doing the exhibition design. I thought it was exciting!
You research a subject, and then you try to figure out how to present it to the
public. Gordon Ashby used to call it storytelling. You’re telling a story, and
you have all these artifacts to use to tell that story. And for the longest time, I
thought that was really a nifty thing to do. When I think about it now, in telling
it to you, I think this obsession I have about making every project a story, and
breaking it down in these parts, and trying to connect it in different ways, and--
all the things we’ve talked about, comes from my thinking about exhibit
design, which I never did, but I admired the people who were working in it.
Riess: Who’s a good example of people who were working in that?
Kriken: Well, the ones that I worked with you know as well; Gordon Ashby at the
Oakland Museum. I knew him when he was putting the Oakland Museum
together. So I heard a lot of stories about that.
Riess: And he would have been working with Kevin Roche? Maybe he had some
stories about that.
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Kriken: I don’t know. He doesn’t have too many Kevin Roche stories, so I think, well; I
don’t know when Gordon came into the scene.
Riess: In other words, who was he telling his story to?
Kriken: Oh, that was the director of the museum. You remember him? [J.S.] Holliday I
believe was his name. He was the director when Gordon did the California
natural history and the cultural history exhibitions.
Riess: But the point is that Gordon Ashby would be visually articulating the story
that the museum would be telling to the public.
Kriken: And Gordon would be doing a lot of the curating too, finding the objects,
deciding which objects would be put out in the public view.
Riess: Well that’s a huge job.
Kriken: It is. A very big job. But anyway, I have to say that it had an influence on me
because I really did think about, or wonder about whether I could make a
career around that. This is when I’m in my twenties, late twenties while
working on HemisFair, I’m still thinking about it, even though my work
actually was focused on city design.
Riess: Well, let’s get you in the door at Skidmore.
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Kriken: Okay. When I came back to San Francisco, I set out to interview with every
firm that claimed to do urban design. I enjoyed it; it was a way to meet people.
And in those days, because there was a demand for designers, they met you. I
mean if you said this is what you do, and you’d be interested in seeing what
they’re doing and talking about possible employment, they would meet you.
And I had this big long list, probably twenty firms and individuals.
Riess: I’m surprised. Can’t imagine.
Kriken: Because there’s not twenty today…
Riess: No.
Kriken: …that are doing that work. And so I went around and met them and talked to
them. And they later became colleagues, many in the same subject area. But the
one thing that SOM had at that time is two projects that I sensed were of
national interest, and they were funded by the federal government. The first
project I did with SOM was the Center Cities Transportation project, which
was funded by the Department of Transportation, D.O.T. We studied five
cities, and every city team had multi-disciplinary expertise from Arthur D.
Little.
Riess: Consulting?
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Kriken: …consulting but very special. These people were brilliant. And each team had
RERC [Real Estate Research Corporation], Wilbur Smith for transportation. It
was a group of national firms, and we had these key people for each of the five
cities. My city was Dallas. It was very inspiring to be discussing problems with
people from the different fields: transportation, real estate, public policy--that
was ADL’s [Arthur D. Little] role, architecture, and urban design.
Riess: The federal government had money for five projects.
Kriken: Yeah. And its purpose was pretty far out. It was, How can we improve the
movement of people in existing downtowns of the United States? These five
cities were picked as prototypical of different city types, so that what we
learned could be applied nationwide. Can you imagine that today? I mean
that’s about as remote a situation as I can think of, in terms of the government
interest in cities. Maybe now they have similar relationships with people in
biomedical, or certain other areas of influence. But then it was cities.
Riess: You’re right. It’s amazing. Was it the Johnson administration?
Kriken: It was--yes, that was Johnson. You know, I sort of got into the field, started
working professionally after Kennedy’s assassination, so it was from Lyndon
forward.
Riess: That’s interesting. And San Francisco was not one of the cities?
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Kriken: No.
Riess: All right. So that project convinced you that Skidmore would be a good match?
Kriken: That was the very first thing that I thought, This is my dream, to be living in
beautiful San Francisco and doing something that has national implications.
And again, helping cities.
Riess: How is it that Skidmore would have gotten that job? Was that because of Nat
Owings?
Kriken: Well, SOM had started a Washington office, and they were busy on
redesigning the Washington Mall, the reflecting pool--what they call
Constitution Gardens, where that lake and the Vietnam Memorial is located,
and the Hirshhorn Museum. All of those things were going on. Nat Owings
had a very strong presence in Washington. I’m sure he had something to do
with it. Or the people in the Washington office by then were putting teams
together and competing for these kinds of contracts.
Riess: SOM had a Washington office because they had jobs like this.
Kriken: Yeah. We were refurbishing the mall. There’s a story David Childs tells…
[Tape 5: Side A]
Riess: You were saying there’s a story David Childs tells.
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Kriken: About part of this project, the Pennsylvania Avenue, which was a run down
street at the time. Nat said, “We’re doing it all wrong. We’re using magic
marker colors to isolate and separate uses, and a street like this should be
mixed use. And it should be set up to attract new investment.” So he created
one of the offshoots of this larger body of Washington work, the Pennsylvania
Avenue Commission. It was Kennedy who told [Patrick] Moynihan that he
thought it was disgraceful, the way the street looked, considering its important
role connecting the Capitol to the White House.
Riess: Owings had the inside relationships with people. He was the personality. But
David Childs was also?
Kriken: Nat hired David almost right out of school. And David always was a very
special person. I mean he just had so many--I’m not quite sure what the word
would be, but he is somebody who, after you talk with him for a while, you
begin to have confidence in. He’s just a remarkable person. Moynihan was
probably one of his best friends. And Moynihan and David did a lot of things
together over the years; David had so many skills. For many years he was head
of the powerful Washington Art Commission; it’s the organization that
oversees all the public works in Washington.
Riess: That’s good. Washington’s a place to be proud of, on a visual level.
Kriken: Yes. On a visual level.
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Riess: You wanted to work with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and they had this great
project. But there were other firms that had urban design studios? Would you
have called it a studio? Or just urban design?
Kriken: I think it was--it wasn’t always seen as a separated practice from architecture. I
think that our studio in San Francisco, and a few others around the country,
really got that started, where we could present it as a separate discipline. I like
to make this point because we would be able to tell a client that they shouldn’t
build a building. And an architect would be very hard-pressed to tell a client
that they should skip this one and go somewhere else. That’s almost
impossible. So we had that trust, that clients would expect us to be able to say,
No, this is a bad idea; or, Yes, this is something that…
Riess: What’s more, you could say to them, No, this is a bad design. And so you
might take it out of the firm.
Kriken: That’s true, too. But that never happened.
Riess: I’m interested in how that works. I read in the New York Times about Kohn
Pederson Fox doing the World Financial Center in Shanghai, and asking in
outside architects. You must have experience of that in projects where you’re
not dealing with Skidmore.
Kriken: A lot of my projects, as you will discover, have many different architects in
them. For the UC Merced master plan Skidmore did the library, Esherick did
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the science and engineering labs, and Hackett, from Portland, did the
classroom building. And I was the overall campus planner. So that happens. In
fact I encourage that, in the name of architectural diversity, which is best
produced by different designers.
Riess: Is that one reason behind creating an urban design studio? Or organizing a
firm in such a way?
Kriken: For a long time that’s what I used to say. I think there might be more to it, now
that I’ve been in practice this long. But I used to say that you cannot practice
architecture and provide the kind of unbiased judgment about what you
should do in a particular place, because architects--it’s our training and it’s
human nature--will take any program, no matter how crazy, and try to make it
work. They will also--it is absolutely in our genetic code--try to make it as big
and singular as they possibly can. I appreciate this. That’s maybe why I’m in
the field I’m in, because it’s big. But I’m often trying to untangle and make
projects into smaller parts that were otherwise conceived in a singular way.
Kriken: I owe much of my early career with SOM to Nat, even though I did not know
him for very long. Nat [Owings] was involved with the California Tomorrow
board, and he had a friendship with Alfred Heller and brought in Marc
Goldstein, who was the project director. I think Marc was a partner then, he
had just been made a partner, and this was the kind of project Marc loves. I
hope you get him to talk about this part of his experience.
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Riess: Let me actually keep this, for talking with him. So, the California Tomorrow
Plan…
Kriken: It came next, after the Center Cities Transportation Project. Nat knew the head
of the Bureau of Land Management. I honestly think Nat believed that
suburban sprawl was bad: And he thought it’s going to be very difficult to use
regulatory methods to shape the way we settle on the land. This is more my
thinking now, but he wondered, Is there some way we could use federal
monies in infrastructure as an incentive to cause people to do the right thing?
Riess: We’re talking about Nat here, when we’re talking “his.”
Kriken: Nat. We’re talking about Nat. He used to say things like, Can’t we figure out
some way so it isn’t just another federal leaf-raking program? He wanted to
find an idea that would cause there to be a different way to achieve
environmental goals. He always used the word “leaf-raking.” [laughter] It’s like
the worst thing that anybody could be doing.
Riess: I’ll keep that in mind. The California Tomorrow Plan fits in nicely, because it
was an exercise in thinking systematically about how things were, and could
be.
Kriken: That’s right. I would say all those early works that were kind of developing
policy approaches--more than actually designing or planning something
specific, it was much more generic, and much more thinking about something
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conceptually. They all came one after the other, three in a row; and they were
very powerful learning experiences. It was a lucky thing that happened to me,
to be jerked up in scale to the whole state of California, and then jerked up
even further to look at the whole United States, in terms of simple techniques
to guide what was going on at the time.
Riess: The California Tomorrow plan seems like such a well-intentioned thing. Then
what happened with it? It’s sort of like you all made a plan, but it’s not that
anyone ever thought the plan would be executed, so it wasn’t a plan in that
sense.
Kriken: It was really an educational piece. Our target was people in the legislature, to
increase their knowledge. As it turned out, a number of states copied us and
did these kinds of plans for their own states. I believe there was a
Massachusetts Tomorrow, and there was an Oregon Tomorrow. I can’t
remember which states followed, but a number did.
Riess: I looked at the oral history with Alfred Heller, and there are a couple of
comments that he made about the California Tomorrow plan.
Kriken: I’d love to hear those.
Riess: [reading] “California Tomorrow came to be regarded as an environmental
group, rather than as it was originally conceived, as a planning group.
California Tomorrow responds to Reagan’s state development plan.”
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Kriken: You mean it was a counter plan to Reagan?
Riess: I wondered. I don’t know anything about that. Anyway, apparently Nat
Owings suggested Marc Goldstein, because they wanted architects, not
planners--too much language with planners, is what he says. What’s that all
about?
Kriken: You know, Alf’s background was a journalist, a writer for the Sacramento Bee.
And the periodical he published called Cry California was about trying to reach
people about what was going on, and to make them care about it. I would say
professional planning language just puts people off. It has nothing to do with
reaching out. It’s more about regulations.
Riess: So Marc planned the agenda, helped by Jerry Goldberg, an urban planner.
Kriken: Jerry Goldberg.
Riess: Jerry Goldberg, an urban planning guy; and John Kriken, the visualization
man. That’s how you’re characterized. [interruption in recording] They did what
Marc Goldstein called a systems probe, allowing them to group problems and
causes. Solutions then became local, “like magic.”
Kriken: It was really fascinating. We had three by five cards, and we had a tack board
that was probably forty feet long. And we used the framework structure of
land, structure, and people. And then we had the driving causes. And we tried
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to pin up policy or ideas in this matrix, this giant matrix, which was organized
by a fine grain of subcategories. I have somewhere a photograph of this great
wall. I was even pinning up little thumbnail sketches that could be used as they
might be published [in the plan]. We did feel that we were finding interesting
combinations and connections. There’s one chart in there that we were quite
interested in, which illustrated that the heaviest government engagement was
involving the people and institutions. And there was almost no government
engagement on the environment at that time. We postulated that it needed to
be virtually reversed--lighten up on the people part and heavier on the
environment part. It’s almost like we’re just shifting the graph from top to
bottom, and bottom to top.
Riess: That must have been a kind of stunning moment.
Kriken: There was one other person involved who became important in my life later
Riess: Oh yes.
on, named Chris Adams.
Kriken: Do you know him?
Riess: Isn’t he at Berkeley?
Kriken: He was at UC Berkeley in facility management after he worked for us on this
project. Then he worked out of the UC president’s office for many years and
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ecame part of the client group when we were selected to plan the new UC
Merced campus. So that’s the tie back.
Riess: Heller says, “Perhaps the California Tomorrow Plan affected Jerry Brown’s
thinking. Hard to trace.” You and I were trying to remember names. It was
Stewart Brand who published the Whole Earth Catalog.
Kriken: Stewart Brand. That’s right.
Riess: Heller said, “They were reluctant to get into political realms.” That makes it
purely conceptual.
Kriken: Yeah. It’s hard for me to remember back. I know we sat one time with Willie
Brown, a young state legislator.
Riess: Willie Brown was in the legislature?
Kriken: Yes. Alf felt it was very important that we bring in people from Sacramento
and Southern California, that it wasn’t going to be a Bay Area, California effort.
It was going to be for the whole state.
Riess: That probably often needs to be remembered. Interesting.
Kriken: Yeah. In fact, for a lot of the sketches in here Alf said, “John, that looks too
much like San Francisco.”
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Riess: Okay, changing the subject back to Skidmore. Who were you closest to at
Skidmore when you got there? Who mentored you?
Kriken: Well, my best friend and ally was Jerry Goldberg. And my mentor was Marc
Goldstein.
Riess: Oh. Tell me about Jerry.
Kriken: Jerry went to Harvard College and to architecture school at Washington
University. I think his professional certification is in urban planning. Jerry and
I had a very successful working relationship. And the reason, from my opinion
anyway, is that Jerry loved complexity and could expand problems. He would
keep finding some new reason to open it up and see more and more
possibilities. And this made me feel safe, because my attitude was always to try
to close it down. So we were working in a harmonious way, but at opposite
ends. And when we finally did bring the problem back to a point, I felt I had
the comfort of Jerry’s mind always trying to keep expanding outward the
possibilities which I wasn’t necessarily thinking about. So he was a great
collaborator.
Riess: To the extent that there was a team working on your kind of problems, it
would have been Jerry.
Kriken: In these early days it was Jerry and Marc, and then Chris Adams worked on
California Tomorrow. And there was another, a woman architect, Cynthia
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Ripley, and another was Kathrin Moore who worked with me for thirty years. I
have many regrets, but one is that I didn’t keep a list of all the people that have
worked with me over the years. There may be some employment record, or
something, at SOM, if they’ve kept it for that long. But now at SOM, I am the
longest member of the San Francisco office--almost forty years, and I am the
source for firm history.
Riess: The institutional memory.
Kriken: I’m the institutional memory, and I have no memory. [laughter]
Riess: And they say about the San Francisco office, and maybe SOM in general, that
they’re not good about records and archiving stuff.
Kriken: We just have so much; finally people say, How many rooms can we fill up with
boxes? They just have to go in and cut, but they don’t always do it carefully. I
think that has happened. Yet they know that for a number of projects there’s
real archival value, and it’s a management responsibility to protect it. Certain
projects are part of American history, and they really deserve to be saved.
Riess: I wonder if this oral history project with the Art Institute of Chicago has some
component of archiving everything. I don’t know. And you wouldn’t want
everything centrally archived anyway. The San Francisco office archive should
be in California.
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Kriken: Probably. That’s true. Although--and then you have to find who would keep it
[Tape 5: Side B]
up, and who would…
Riess: For me it is an issue of getting a dated list of all your work, and Marc
Goldstein’s work.
Kriken: We have to just try and get some date framework. But you see [looking at some
notes] there’s about four hundred projects that I have directed. The total must
be in the tens of thousands.
Riess: Alphabetically.
Kriken: Alphabetically, and not in any time sequence.
Riess: It’s not like I can call the San Francisco office, because they’re not going to be
able to fill in the blanks.
Kriken: Right. I could ask if there’s any means in the office to apply dates to this list. I
would like to have it too, because it drives me crazy that I can’t remember… I
can sort of remember the decade. [laughter] But these were so fast and furious.
Riess: In your notes to me, you list the early projects: Center City Transportation,
California Tomorrow, and the National Land Use Policy Plan that you talked
about a bit. How was that organized?
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Kriken: That was just Jerry and myself, and Nat. We may have brought Marc in from
time to time. But it was just Jerry and myself. That was for the Bureau of Land
Management. And it was in Nixon’s time. And it was a possibility that it might
be used in a state of the union policy that he might put forward about the use
of land. But that did not happen. I have no regrets that this may not have
gained traction at that moment in time, because it’s been so informative to
other projects we’ve done. It was just like going to school for nine months and
learning about something new, and then being able to apply it in other places.
So I’ve never been devastated by that at all. And we had a lot--it was hard to
know what to do with it. But I remember the guy--not David Crane, but
another guy from Philadelphia, Edmund Bacon, who was head of
redevelopment, and--so well known. He wrote a book called Design of Cities.
We gave [the report] to him to read, and he said it was genius. He was excited
about it. But it was up to Nat to decide what to do with it; he was still alive
then.
Riess: On that report were you, once again, what they would call the visualization
man?
Kriken: Partly. But I always liked to do sort of reductive thinking. To take something
very wordy and complex, and reduce it down to like three words for each
thing, or something like that.
Riess: How do you do that? What’s the technique? Seriously.
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Kriken: Seriously? I think, for me, it was a little bit like… Like in the federal
infrastructure story, we decided that there was only three ways to deal with
population growth. I said, One is to try to hold population in a given place, and
not let the loss of jobs, or some other economic downturn cause people to exit,
because that’s so wasteful of infrastructure. So, there should be a government
role to try to find new sources of work for cities like Detroit, Michigan. We
hold the population there and keep the infrastructure functioning. Then there
was another one that I called to intensify population, which was basically to take
certain parts of existing cities, and for good reasons try to increase the density
in those areas. And the third I called to direct population settlement, which is to
direct it to specific non-environmentally harmful locations. So there was to hold,
to intensify, and to direct. And we’re always working in one of those places.
Riess: And in a lot of planning prose, you could see the basic issues.
Kriken: I’m just diagramming; it’s the drive to try to visually conceptualize. Because if
it’s just words you can go on forever. But if you want to make a picture of it,
you have to somehow simplify it.
Riess: So, the National Land Use Policy Plan. And the San Antonio River Corridor
Study was by that time a Skidmore plan.
Kriken: Yeah. There was two phases. You know, one working in San Antonio with Al
and Mimi, and then on San Antonio’s World’s Fair. The second phase came
when I was with SOM. I had friends in San Antonio when this project came up,
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and they were in touch. And my wife at that time was working for a planning
firm called Marshall Kaplan, Ganz, and Kahn--MKGK. We formed a team with
MKGK and ourselves, and maybe we had some other consultants to go after it.
Marc was the partner in charge, and Jerry again, and myself, and we had other
staff too.
Riess: You formed a team to go after that? That’s another thing. I have been assuming
everything we’ve talked about here just came to you.
Kriken: So far, yes. But always there’s a phase where you’re putting together some case
why you would be the best team, or you have the best insight into what the
particular problem is. In this proposal, besides the fact that I had been there
and worked there and knew a lot of the people--we did a two-page response.
Most of our competitors had done hundred-page books. The city review panel
was stunned that we could say so much in two pages. And then we were
selected to interview with this city group and finally we were selected. The last
thing I’d like to tell you about San Antonio, if I haven’t already, is that while
I’d done a lot of stressful things over the years, this was extreme. In this case
we had to go there every other week and make a presentation to the River
Corridor Committee that was televised and shown on the evening news.
Basically we were there for three or four days, and then we had a week to work
at home, and then we were back there again. So not only did we have to
prepare something visual, and ideas too, but it had to be interesting; we
couldn’t talk just about mundane things, because it would be on television. So
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our presentations always had to have some juice to make them exciting and
forward-moving.
Riess: It was being presented over local television so that the city could weigh in too?
Kriken: I think it was being televised for news bites, news program bites. So it wasn’t
literally word for word. But still, we had to present in front of cameras, and in
those days they made a lot of noise, big monster cameras. And I had a bit of
stage fright in those kinds of conditions.
Riess: Did you really? But you don’t anymore, do you?
Kriken: I do. I do still. I really prepare--if I give a lecture or something, I memorize the
whole thing. I virtually memorize it, and then I don’t think about it, and then I
get up there and it sounds like it’s just off the top of my head. But I have
worked on it so hard that I could recite it in my sleep.
Riess: Oh, that’s so much work.
Kriken: I’ve never been comfortable except after I’ve done all that preparation, then I
feel comfortable. I love giving talks in China because I have all the time to think
about my next sentence while they’re translating the last one. That’s the speed
that I can be very comfortable at.
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Riess: There were other planning things in the Skidmore office--California’s Napa
Valley towns?
Kriken: Oh, St. Helena.
Riess: In 1974, Skidmore showed how St. Helena might improve its approaches and
circulation. That would have fallen to you then?
Kriken: Um-hmm. I did that in the space of two weeks while I was planning a new city
in Iran. I had a studio outside the office at 300 Broadway because there just
wasn’t space for me to be back in the main office. We took that job; I think it
was like for twenty-five thousand dollars, or less. It’s the classic dilemma that
exists in many cities to this day, that in a town like St. Helena no one could
afford to live there. And the only places to live, that’s remotely affordable, are
trailer courts. The people who work in the stores can’t afford to live there, as
well as the schoolteachers, nobody. So, we said basically that they shouldn’t
expand into the vineyards for new land for new affordable housing, that if they
just looked carefully there were these infill sites all through the existing village
of St. Helena. And of course those just became more rich person housing after
we finished, so this plan didn’t ever serve the social purpose that we had
hoped for. But that was actually the issue. And then, just--I go up to St. Helena
a lot because our country place is, you know, further north on Highway 29.
Riess: This is Clear Lake?
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Kriken: Clear Lake, yeah. And one of my recommendations to St. Helena was to put in
traffic signals in two places so people could cross Highway 29, their main
street. They can go from one side of the city to the other, which was very hard
to do before the traffic signals. But now, on my way to the lake, I sit there in a
traffic signal gridlock, and I think, I did this! This is my penance for making
that recommendation.
Riess: That is so interesting, that at the same time that you were doing this, you were
planning a new town in Iran. That came to Skidmore because of you?
Kriken: No. Actually, that particular project came to us because of a fellow named
Nader Ardalan, who had a firm in Iran called Mandala. And he used to work
for the San Francisco office of Skidmore and was a close friend of Marc’s.
Riess: Oh, this is Bandar Shapur, or something like that?
Kriken: Yeah. We did two with him. The big one was Bandar Shapur, and that’s down
Riess: No.
by the Persian Gulf, near the city of Abadan. And the other one was a suburb
of Ahwaz. That’s by the Tigris or Euphrates River, I think. [Karun River] And
those were both with Marc, in this relationship. Then I eventually had a work
relationship with Nader, and the firm wanted me to go move to Iran. Did I tell
you about that last time?
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Kriken: Well, in this new relationship with Nader, the SOM partners decided that they
should open an office in Iran because of the amount of new work that was
coming in. And so one night at the Intercontinental Hotel in Tehran, I found
myself in a hotel room with about six national partners from Chicago and New
York, as well as John Merrill from San Francisco. I was sitting on the edge of
the bed, and they were all sitting around, and my recollection is, one of them--
it may have been Bill Hartmann from Chicago said, “You know, John, there are
times at Skidmore where we all have had to make sacrifices. And we’re asking
you to come and run this office for Skidmore in Tehran.” Well, it was the last
place on earth… I always was like a physical and mental wreck whenever I
came back from there. But I didn’t say anything. I just maybe said, “Well, that’s
a big decision. I’ll have to think about it,” or something like that. But I didn’t
say, “No way.” Then John Merrill came to my rescue and said, “Well, I think
the San Francisco partners will want to talk about this, and see what John’s
obligations are in other things.” And that saved me. I didn’t say anything; I just
let time pass. And the San Francisco partners, probably John and Marc, decided
it wouldn’t be a good idea to let me go there. And it certainly wouldn’t have.
Riess: There was that much work from Iran?
Kriken: In that window, before the Shah was deposed, yeah. They did find another
person from the Chicago office to go there, and that was Jim DeStefano.
Riess: So he saw going to Iran as an opportunity.
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Kriken: I guess. Or his partners maybe decided that they’d just as soon have him be out
[Tape 6: Side A]
of the office for a while. I don’t know. [laughter] I mean there’s often some
politics going on.
Riess: I want to ask you here about the book that you’re writing, so that for this
project on the history of SOM, people will know that maybe if we haven’t
talked in depth about something or other, you have written in depth about it.
Kriken: I began the work on the book before the oral history. The book’s working title
is Building Cities for The 21 st Century. And it presents nine principles for
building livable cities.
Riess: What is the audience?
Kriken: The audience would be, of course, professionals in our field, and academic--
both students and faculty. I wanted to write it in such a way that it would also
be educational for the general public, or the general public who have an
interest in how cities should be built. We would, through this work, give
people some new tools to talk about cities and to argue for things that might
support sustainability and green approaches, as well as making cities livable.
Not just addressing practical, functional, problem-solving things, but to deal
with the sensory qualities of living in cities. And I guess we thought of it…
Well, anyway, that’s the motive behind it. And I invited a colleague that
worked with me in San Francisco for many years, who is now a partner in the
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Chicago office in charge of urban design, Phil Enquist, to critique and let me
use some of his experience. I had two motives. One is that I thought this was
important information to try to put out there, but I didn’t want it to be like a
summary of the work I’ve done in my life, like a portfolio of my work. And so I
wanted the book to have an educational purpose. And then I also wanted to
link it to the future. Phil’s about ten, fifteen years younger than I am. And in
my mind, he is the future of carrying on this tradition at SOM, and broadly
speaking, the professional area itself. I would use some of his projects, as well
as others in the firm, to illustrate the various principles and points I am trying
to make. And my hope is that he might do the same thing when he gets to my
age: he might pick a young person and do the next version--what they learned.
It could carry on beyond just this one piece.
Riess: Is it going to be heavily illustrated?
Kriken: Yes. I think there are about--it sounds crazy, but I think there are about thirty-
five or forty projects, and they are illustrated to the degree they make the point
we want to make. Every project doesn’t tell all of its story. And that could be a
weakness in the book, but we wanted to have a reason to bring up each project,
not just to show it off. But I wanted to show why it fulfilled some criteria, or
something I thought had to do importantly with making good cities, and being
livable cities.
Riess: Are you having a kind of retrospective experience of things in a way that you
hadn’t realized how they fit together?
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Kriken: You mean just in doing the writing?
Riess: Yeah.
Kriken: I think that’s probably true.
Riess: Or are you trying to rationalize what you were doing?
Kriken: [laughter] Well, over the years I have always tried, when I was given a problem,
to think about what in this problem is a more universal aspect that goes
beyond just the circumstantial things that surround the particular problem, and
that if brought forward could be useful to people other than myself. I’ve
always been doing that. And, you might say, it’s the way we talk about projects
in the office too. I’m sure we’ve done more to organize the projects around
ideas than I would have done had I not done the book.
Riess: Do you have a publisher?
Kriken: Yes. Princeton Architectural Press. And the executive editor, Clare Jacobson,
who lives in San Francisco--she recently moved from New York to San
Francisco.
Riess: It will be certainly a history of the urban design studio at Skidmore, Owings &
Merrill.
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Kriken: It’s a history of the studio, and also I think, and Phil thinks, and maybe
generally the people who practice at SOM think, that we do have a very unique
background of experience because our work has been so focused on cities, most
often big cities, high-density--all the things that probably ninety percent of the
profession does not experience. And yet, we feel that the future of making
good cities, and dealing with population growth, is going to involve a lot more
thinking about how to put higher density cities together and still make them
livable. So, when I say it’s about “building cities for the 21 st century,” I really
mean the bigger cities. We’re going to have a lot of cities of a million people. In
China every city is a million people or more.
Riess: When you first came in 1970, I don’t know what you expected to be doing, but
was it urban design?
Kriken: Well, I interviewed with many firms in the Bay Area, and after that interview
process, found that Skidmore had a project that was at the scale I was really
interested in. That was what brought me to SOM.
Riess: What was the office like then, when you arrived? Were you in the Zellerbach
building?
Kriken: No. We were in the Alcoa building, which is the X-braced building next to
Golden Gateway.
Riess: When you say “we” that means together with other people in the office.
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Kriken: That’s a very Skidmore thing to do. Because we think of ourselves as a group
practice, as opposed to a single individual.
Riess: But it might very well have been you all the way through?
Kriken: Well, it’s a little hard for me to say. It was a part of our culture, part of what we
did, and part of what we wanted people to understand, that we would help
them to get whatever the problem was to a level that really met lots of
objectives and goals, but especially public interest objectives. In urban design,
my field, it’s not just about making large-scale architecture. It’s really a concern
for blending strongly the obligations of the public realm and the public
engagement with private development.
Riess: Developers would be your clients? Or cities would be your clients? Such
different clients.
Kriken: Very--I guess that’s right. I mean it is just simply there is the public sector, like
in San Antonio; doing the river in San Antonio was completely a public-based
project. Many of our largest projects have been private, or combinations, public
and private, which is actually something that is more typical now, where there
is some kind of a joint venture arrangement between the city, or local
government, and a project. Sometimes we work for national governments: the
Federal Land Use; or we’ve developed new towns in countries; that was for the
national government.
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Riess: Okay, so you began to see how this would work if you stayed within SOM.
Kriken: Right.
Riess: It sounds like you must then have begun to bring people in.
Kriken: Let me think--Jerry Goldberg and I were both associate partners in the firm.
And I think most people thought--and I think it was true--that we were a team,
and we ran this department together. Except we had different strengths. Jerry
was a writer and policy thinker. And I was interested in the three-dimensional
design, and also policy, but not exactly the same way Jerry did. But it was a
good combination.
Riess: So at the top of the office was it John Merrill?
Kriken: Well, in those early days, definitely John Merrill as a managing partner. Wally
Costa was also a managing partner.
Riess: Did these guys take an interest in what was going on?
Kriken: We had a partner when I first came whose name was John Weese. And John,
among the partners, was very interested in what we were doing. He had some
background working in transportation, so he liked to discuss urban design. But
Marc was the partner who took the greatest interest in what we were doing in
those early days.
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Riess: Once you could see your specialty, that you two were an entity, was there a
way that you put the word out?
Kriken: Let me explain that. Once we sort of had the people who would work together
in this subject, it was a very simple step to begin to answer requests for
proposals; it wasn’t that I had to just receive the work from Marc Goldstein, or
Nat Owings, or somebody in the office, but that we could target different
subjects that we were interested in, and interview for them, and get these new
jobs.
Riess: How does that happen? I mean it’s like in the public domain--a request for
proposal?
Kriken: They are in the public domain. There’s also a network of people who would
say, “John, you have to respond to this RFP,” or something like that. I mean
that’s how we got back into San Antonio, is that we had friends in San Antonio
that called and wanted us to go after it. But generally, there’s a process: you
write up your qualifications and your background, and then you’re asked to
interview for the project. And sometimes you bring in that interview some first
ideas or musings about what could be. You’re usually interviewed with maybe
three or four or five other firms, and then they select the one they want to work
with. And it’s a hard thing to do, because I always say that you have to project
to the people you’re interviewing with that you’re in love with this project, but
really you don’t want to fall in love with it because you may not get it. And
you don’t want to be sad all the time because you didn’t get one project or
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another. It’s like a play-acting, you have to bring forward all this interest; and
yet, in your mind, in your heart, you’re keeping a distance, keeping a sort of a
healthy distance.
Riess: The other four or five other guys, you don’t hear what they propose, do you?
Kriken: No, you don’t hear what the competitors say. But over the years, you get to
know what different firms--how they approach things, and then you figure out
strategies to undercut them, and… It’s fun. I mean you can get into it as just
another creative thing to work on.
Riess: Would you and Jerry present it together?
Kriken: For those kind of things, virtually always. And then I was elevated to partner.
Riess: Yes.
And I think it was in ’84.
Kriken: And in ’89 or ’90, we had a terrible crisis in the firm.
Riess: No. The whole firm, or is this San Francisco?
Kriken: In the whole firm. In the 1980s we had just one office building coming in after
another. We didn’t have to interview, we didn’t have to compete with
anybody, it just all flowed in the door. In the meantime, all the competing
99

architectural firms--had tried to niche and specialize in certain subject areas.
Like there were firms that were specializing in hospitals and laboratory
buildings and schools, and just every building type, hotels, residential. And if
you didn’t have this body of work in a specific subject area, you weren’t a
player. And in the ‘90s everybody stopped building office buildings for about
four years. There was a saturation of office space. And we just went crashing
downhill. In many of these subject areas we hadn’t even competed, because
why write an eighty-page book, slave over that to get some new project, when
we have plenty of work? And so, because we were so single-purpose, focused,
we totally crashed.
Riess: And the reason other firms were developing the niches is because they couldn’t
get any office building work, because SOM was doing it all?
Kriken: Yeah. Well, we were doing a lot of it. I think--you know, it just was a time
when the clients demanded people that had deep experience in a particular
subject that they were interested in. And it was especially the subjects that had
technical characteristics. For housing, you wouldn’t call that as technical, but
it’s just being familiar enough with housing that you knew the shortcuts, and
you knew the efficiencies of constructing it, as well as planning it and all the
rest. And so all of that made these niche practices. Anyway, what I’m getting
to, finally, is that the firm totally crashed. This is after, by the way, John Merrill
and Wally Costa, and all these people, retired.
Riess: What does crash mean?
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Kriken: Well, I mean we came very close to bankruptcy. And we had to fire fully half
the firm. And I say fire. We had to let go. I mean fire seems like the wrong
word. But we had to let go half the firm. I was a partner, so I had to do that,
with one other partner there. It was two of us. And it was a horrible time. Jerry
[Goldberg] did not have any billable clients, and Jerry was part of that. It was
all about billing-the people we let go had nothing to do with their value to the
firm, it was, Did they have any clients? Could they bill against anything?
Riess: What if they had a title, like associate partner?
Kriken: We also cut partners. We also fired--or let go many partners.
Riess: So there’s no guarantee when you’re a partner.
Kriken: No. It’s a very--how shall I say? It’s not like being a tenured professor. Even
though you have an ownership position, it’s still subject to review of the other
partners. And this was firm-wide. This was not just San Francisco. Anyway, I
remember that I found a way through planning, finally, to get back on our feet;
I remember that I started working up in Sacramento with the parks directors
and the State Department of Parks.
Riess: Did that mean SOM had to move out of the space that you occupied?
Kriken: We did move, but that was more a part of our normal pattern of moving.
Riess: What is that pattern of moving anyway?
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Kriken: Well, every ten years, the length of our lease, we try to move to a new SOM
[Tape 6: Side B]
office building.
Kriken: …and so we could more or less go with a fresh start in a new space. The
Chicago office is in an old Burnham and Root building. And the New York
office is in an old building. And we are in an old SOM building. So perhaps the
days when SOM moves to new buildings are over. We’re not doing that
anymore. But that was a time when we were still moving around. And in the
case of San Francisco, we were in the Crown Zellerbach building, then we were
in the Alcoa building, then we were in 333 Bush Street. And then we went back
to what was originally 444 Market Street and is now Front St.
Riess: That probably accounts for the paucity of records. Every time you move,
Kriken: Right.
somebody makes some decision to give things the heave-ho.
Riess: Okay. So downsizing…
Kriken: So anyway, we went through that horrible time. And I do want to emphasize
that some of the best people we ever had in the firm were part of that cut. We
could not save anybody that didn’t have a project that they were working on at
the time.
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Riess: You were the chief person at the firm then?
Kriken: It was myself and Larry Doane; we were the two partners in the SF office. So,
there were times that I did have these larger office administrative
responsibilities.
Riess: That sounds really hard. I wonder if those you let go got absorbed into other
firms?
Kriken: Oh yeah. They did. Everybody, I think, landed on their feet. But I know for a
lot of those people, SOM was what they identified their life with, doing work,
the quality, and the professionalism, and all those things. And to take that
away seemed cruel. And then, the attorneys told us that there are certain things
we couldn’t tell people when we were letting them go because it might give
them some leverage to sue, or to come back at the firm. So that the messages
we had to give people at that moment of separation were, by and large,
abstract, kind of cool, totally unsatisfactory. It was tragic, the way it had to be
done.
Riess: So there was no way they could hold onto their ego?
Kriken: More or less we just said, We’re out of work, we’re having to cut back our staff
and everyone who isn’t busy or doesn’t have a billable project. And we want to
thank you for all the years you’ve been with us. But, so long. It was just about
that cold. And it wasn’t because I--I could have sat there for days with people,
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kind of reminiscing and talking about helping them to the next thing. But it
had to be so cutthroat.
Riess: The firm attorneys, you had to run it past them?
Kriken: Right. And you know there’s a bit more to this story.
Riess: Oh, I see.
Kriken: Of course, after we had let people go, there was a lot of turmoil in the firm.
And some of the recent retired partners could not conceive of the firm being in
that position. They must have thought we were pulling some tricks on them to
avoid paying them their full retirement compensation. We were just trying to
make it to the next fiscal year.
Riess: Did any of them sue the firm?
Kriken: Yes. They did. We were fighting from every direction to stay alive in that time.
Riess: And you had to be involved with this? Or could it be turned over to the
attorneys?
Kriken: We definitely had attorneys to help. I was told at one point, “John, you better
get a lawyer and figure out what you’re going to do if we go bankrupt.” My
liabilities as a partner were enormous.
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Riess: Wow.
Kriken: So it was a very serious thing.
Riess: Yeah. And then you wonder what partnership means?
Riess: Did buildings just come to a halt?
Kriken: Some of the projects had kept going. I also must tell you that coming out of this
negative time, we, individually and collectively, decided that this was never,
ever going to happen again. And now--I can speak for the San Francisco office--
we have expertise in healthcare, residential, labs, academic, courts, and office
buildings. There’s no way we’re going to get blindsided like that again.
Riess: How many years did it take to make that shift?
Kriken: I think about four or five years.
Riess: I think that sounds pretty amazing.
Kriken: You know, it was a big comeback. And not too many people in the profession
knew how serious it was. We received one of the first firm awards that the AIA
has ever given. After we got through this event, they gave us another one
because we survived--at least that’s the way I took it.
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Riess: So the first firm award was back in the glory days?
Kriken: It’s hanging up in our office, but it’s probably like [1962], something like that,
when Nat, and Bunshaft were doing Lever House, and all that good stuff.
Riess: And then [in 1996] you got the second award. The “most improved” award.
Kriken: [laughter] I don’t remember all the circumstances, but in my mind it was
because we were back on our feet again.
Riess: Skidmore, has the firm been viewed fondly in the profession, or has it always
been so big that it’s easy to dislike?
Kriken: I think that we occupy a place in the profession for which there’s not a lot of
competition, really. I mean, there are star architects that do big buildings, but
generally, we do whole cities. They do a building; we do multiple buildings in
a variety of cities. I think people come to us because while there are partners
trying to do cutting edge, design people know what we do will work, and it
will be cost effective, and people sense that, that quality just comes through
somehow. And so while they can get landmark-type projects from the firm,
there’s very little risk that things won’t work out. But I do think--particularly
when I first joined Skidmore in the ‘70s, when Vietnam was going on, and
Black Power was going on, I would give lectures and I would get catcalls
because I was representing the establishment--SOM was the epitome in
architecture.
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Riess: What was the hiring policy, in the good [old] days, of women and minorities, at
Skidmore?
Kriken: You know, I remember when I walked in, everybody seemed to be white, and
they wore white shirts and ties. And it was a very harmonious look to the
studio. I think the firm demographics matched the schools. There weren’t very
many women in the schools. In my graduating class at Berkeley, there might
have been two or three women within seventy. And now they’re fifty/fifty, or
even more women than men in some instances. I think the office is really
looking exactly like the profile of people who are being trained in the field. We
would like to have more black architects in the leadership area of the firm. But
they do so well setting up their own firms, because they can team with
multiple architects to meet affirmative action requirements. But we have black
partners, and we have women partners, but never in a large percentage of the
overall…
Riess: You’re saying a black architect is going to naturally have clients because he’s a
black architect?
Kriken: I believe a good architect will have clients regardless of race or gender.
However, since the days of affirmative action, a minority architect could
always become a team member, to help the overall team meet the affirmative
action goals for public work. So they could do well professionally and
economically.
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Riess: How about Hispanic?
Kriken: We have a lot of Hispanics, but many of them are from Spain and Bilbao, and
Brazil, Chile. They’re probably from different European backgrounds, but they
speak Spanish.
Riess: Well, that’s all interesting. I guess to finish off this story, since you said that the
turnaround was effectively in five years, how did you do that? You didn’t
declare bankruptcy, which is one way of dealing with debt.
Kriken: No, we just powered our way through it. I can’t remember all the different
things we had to do, but there was one year that we just cut our salaries out
and tried to pay everybody else.
Riess: The question of why suddenly nobody needed office buildings, was that the
economy?
Kriken: Um-hmm. That just--that happens. From the beginning, one thing I liked about
SOM was its geographic coverage. I had been aware that cities have moments
of very strong growth and change, and then they’re quiet; and they might be
quiet for twenty years, and then they come back again. And so what you do
really depends on the place you’re located; you are subject to these hot times
and quiet times. But seeing the potential of SOM, I believed the whole world
was my canvas, so to speak. I could try to promote work anywhere, and
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particularly where there was something going on. And that would be hard to
do from the position of being a smaller and less well-known name.
Riess: Was that part of the discussion at the general partners’ meetings? I mean, how
did that play out in Chicago and New York? Was everyone…
Kriken: Oh, I think everybody took the same stand. I think each of the offices had a
slightly different problem. But generally, the firm cut itself in half, from the top
down.
Riess: But wasn’t San Francisco in a stronger position because you were already
doing more urban design?
Kriken: Oh. My group is too small to support the office financially. But, as I recall the
urban design studio was also set back by a reduced work load. I met a fellow
from Palo Alto who was consulting to California State Parks and Recreation.
They were doing the Railroad Museum in Sacramento, and they wanted a
critique of the Railroad Museum. This was like rebuilding, clawing our way
back. So I did a critique of the Railroad Museum, and that led to something else
and something else. And then pretty soon I got to know the state architect, Sim
van der Ryn. After I had done work for him, he wanted to get together with
me. And he eventually invited me to become deputy state architect, which I
declined. I could see that for the kind of things I wanted to do--I couldn’t be
fixed in one location.
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Riess: But did you feel at some point like you might have bailed out of SOM?
Kriken: Yeah. That was the time.
Riess: Were there other attractive possibilities?
Kriken: The only other time was when I was an associate partner, and I was looking to
sort of optimize my profile in the profession of urban design, and I was
arguing for being promoted to partner. And at one time I did talk to John
Merrill about the need for me to do that, or I would have to start looking for
something else. I never said, I quit, but I did feel it was important. They hadn’t
made partners in the urban design practice at Skidmore, but they did make a
partner in the Chicago office who practiced urban design. But he had a very
different approach to urban design than my practice in San Francisco. I
thought, Well, they’re starting to do this now. We were a smaller office. That
was the problem then. We couldn’t justify many partners. We could only
support a few.
Riess: Who’s the one in Chicago?
Kriken: His name was Roger Seitz. He was very effective in working in support of the
architects. In other words, he would go in and find out all the zoning and the
setbacks, and everything you needed to know to do a project. And he did some
large-scale planning projects too, but he did not have the design philosophy we
practiced in San Francisco.
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Riess: About the global practice, did that help?
Kriken: Well, that’s another time that the economy crashed a little bit, in the ‘70s, and
that’s when I was able to go to Iran to work. A lot of people were stuck in the
States during this low point. But we could go to Iran and do these new cities.
And so that’s probably what made an impression on me about the flexibility
that I had working in this environment.
Riess: [Tell me about the other SOM offices.]
[interruption in recording]
Kriken: Chicago and New York, San Francisco were the first three offices, in that order.
Then we added Washington D.C., London, Los Angeles, and Shanghai. Early
on we had offices in Oregon, Paris, Tehran, Boston, and Hong Kong. All of
these have been closed. The L.A. office specializes in interiors and to keep a
presence in Los Angeles. It is managed by the San Francisco office.
Riess: That’s what it’s for?
Kriken: Well, we do interiors, and it’s a good team down there. The New York partners
always believed we should move out of San Francisco; it’s too hard to work in
San Francisco, we should go down to L.A. And I would always say, “You guys,
there are so few Class A office buildings down there, the firm could never have
a huge body of work coming from that area.”
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Riess: What does Class A office building mean?
Kriken: Well that’s the top of the rent scale for office buildings.
Riess: Why would that be? L.A. certainly has got the money.
Kriken: Yeah, a couple of developers built the library tower and a couple of other Class
[Tape 7: Side A]
A buildings. They tried to create a real downtown core for L.A. but they failed.
Riess: It’s more spread out.
Kriken: It’s too spread out. There’s less concentration. And therefore, there’s less
accumulated value in terms of real estate. It’s spread out and gets watered
down. And there is no planning. Very little happens there in terms of planning
and urban design work. I was able to win a contract to plan Hollywood.
Riess: A Hollywood plan.
Kriken: A plan for Hollywood. And I also did a plan for the Rapid Transit from
Wilshire Boulevard to North Hollywood. And I did some work for the
Universal Studios people. Marc Goldstein did a beautiful producers office
building on the Universal lot.
Riess: But anyway, you explained to the people in New York that L.A. was not the
place.
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Kriken: I always did, but they never believed it, because it has such a strong New York
business connection. So they believe that’s got to be the center of the West
Coast in every way. Well, there may be more banking going on there than up
here, but architecturally, it has not manifested itself. Most of Gehry’s work has
been outside of the area. He lives there. And for Morphosis, most of their work
is now international, and very little happens there.
Riess: And those are both really one-man firms. Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne. At
least I think of them that way.
Kriken: Gehry, I think it’s probably a pretty big office. He has partners; I’ve met some
of his partners. But it’s still him; he’s the genius.
Riess: [interruption in recording] Larry Halprin did landscape work in L.A.
Kriken: He did some steps near the library building. Oh, and he did also the interior of
the pair of buildings which Marc Goldstein designed.
Riess: Was it Crocker Financial?
Kriken: Crocker Financial, yeah.
Riess: So, we were talking about the little SOM offices.
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Kriken: And I remember we talked about keeping ears to the ground in L.A. It was a
constant pressure from our New York partners to see if there’s something on.
Gensler has a hundred-man office down there, what’s wrong with us?
Riess: The competition there.
Kriken: Yeah. Well, but they’re interiors too; they do architecture, but they’re famous
for their interiors. And maybe if interiors is your entry point, maybe that is a
good way to begin a practice down there. But the way we do it, is that building
design is the first order of interest. We did have a full-service office there. I
spent a lot of time trying to make that office go.
Riess: I am curious about the relationships that SOM had in San Francisco with
developers, and why there were so many offices around here done by SOM.
There must have been some, whatever--politics.
Kriken: I know that my partners tend to have relationships with four or five major
companies. It’s shifting and changing over the years, but a lot of it is just the
personal relationships--what I mean to say is you’re comfortable working with
each other because you know each other on another level than just doing
business. All the partners at Skidmore have personal relationships with people
in the development world. I have a very successful development client, Vincent
Lo, from Hong Kong and Shanghai, who is probably one of the largest
developers in China. He’s well regarded by the government of China. I have
developed a creative relationship with him and others over the years. But the
same, I think, is true for all the architects who are doing buildings.
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Riess: The development world? The ones who are covering the land with buildings,
they aren’t bad people?
Kriken: No, I’m very careful--I don’t know how to say this, but I approach every new
person that I meet who could be a potential client, not with my arms open, but
with a certain amount of suspicion: Are they good people? Or are they looking
for a quick buck--to turn a property over and make some money and run,
instead of doing a project that’s lasting and important and contributing. And
there are both kinds. So you have to find out. And they have to find out about
you too, because they have the same suspicions about you.
Riess: Their worst nightmare would be that you were a guy who wanted to do a
super expensive trophy job.
Kriken: Yeah, something that would be self-aggrandizing, or that I was just a
marketing guy, and I had all these young, inexperienced people working for
me who were actually doing the work, and it wouldn’t be any more deep or
meaningful than some guy with five years out of college. They do have that
suspicion [laughs], especially toward a firm like SOM, which, as they know, has
a lot of people; and they know there’s few partners, and so how can a few
partners be thoughtfully involved in their project? So it is a two-way getting to
know each other. They want to know that you really are committed; and we
want to know that they have a good value system and that they would do the
right thing.
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Riess: You are an urban design partner. Then on a project do you bring in what you
call a design support person?
Kriken: I always had somebody working with me on the projects, who would be a
senior person in the firm, because I couldn’t be with [the client] all the time.
The people who are meeting you and talking to you want to know how you
add value to the project, how you bring your experience and contribute to the
project. And that’s what you have to convey; that’s what you do and that’s
your life. You think about cities and only cities, and how it all fits together.
Riess: A kind of city nerd.
Kriken: Yeah, right. The best thing of all in an interview is to start talking about cities,
and what works, and what doesn’t work. Then pretty soon… Because they’re
generally--somebody like Vincent who is very academically, practically, and
politically interested in cities, in all those ways. He asks me to give talks to his
staff. What is urban design? And guess what? He comes and listens to my talks
about urban design, just as an opportunity to catch up on something. But it is a
two-way street. They’re very wary of us, and we’re somewhat wary of them
too. We have to be. And then, hopefully, it works.
Riess: You want to be educating your clients. You’re pulling them along.
Kriken: I think that that’s true--that’s why teaching at Cal is so natural, because you’re
either teaching or you’re trying to find out if your idea is valid. But you usually
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have a point of view that leads you to make a proposal, and then… When I’m
working overseas I have to bow to the fact that it’s not America, and it’s a
different culture, and it’s different in a lot of ways. I have misgauged places
culturally and tried to bring forward some American idea, or something that I
know has worked here, to this other culture, and suddenly realized it’s totally
wrong, it does not connect.
Riess: When you say, “suddenly realize,” you mean you can actually read your
audience, read the faces?
Kriken: No, I mean it really is just learning more about the city. It might come from the
client, or the city planners who are reviewing the client’s work, or something
like that. But for example, one of my strongest design principles, that is the
most fun to deal with, is identity. How do you create identity, unique identity?
Whether it’s a building, a block, a neighborhood, a city--all the different scales,
what makes a place different and memorable in your mind? I brought that
attitude to Hong Kong. I kept trying to sell the developers there on the idea
that each residential building should be uniquely identifiable so it didn’t have
this institutional project look that I felt so strongly in Hong Kong and that I
thought was wrong, that was inhuman. And little by little, I realized that
people in Hong Kong have a totally different feeling about the city. The city is a
wonder of the world in its transit systems--all the buildings connected by
bridges and escalators, and its multi-level public realms, and its big, huge
building blocks. One time a person told me that he thought there was no great
architecture in Hong Kong--this is somebody who worked there and lived
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there--but it was so interesting as an object of urban design. And at another
client meeting, somebody said, “John, your proposal is interesting, but it’s so
disordered.” Because I had buildings at different heights, on a hillside, like San
Francisco. And this person, a woman, said that the natural thing there is that all
the buildings are the same height--they all conform to each other. There’s not
one taller than the other. And little by little, I realized that the way people think
of their city--Hong Kong--it’s almost like a single mega-structure. It’s as close
to Arcosanti as anything that’s been built on the earth, because it all is so
connected, it’s all so close together. And the densities are so extreme.
Riess: It’s not such an old city, is it?
Kriken: No, it isn’t. But it had these tremendous limitations; by the harbor, and by the
steep mountains, and other things, which didn’t allow it a lot of land. So it had
to go up. And then they had peculiarities of their government: the government
actually builds a lot of the housing. I was trying to bring to it this idea that at
the individual building level there should be these really highly recognizable
differences, especially in residential areas. And finally it hit me that they didn’t
live in that kind of place, an individual… They lived in an environment that
was complex, and they sought simplicity and unity. Maybe they were relating
to the steep mountains and the harbor and had no need for individual
buildings being different. Anyway, I could think of many more things like that.
Riess: When you’re talking with Vincent Lo, can the two of you figure each other out
and talk about these things?
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Kriken: After we’ve had this long relationship and done so many projects together, I
think now we do, you know. I might even bring forward a question, because I
don’t feel certain about it, about the way people would see something,
particularly when you get into temples and historic buildings, and relation
with new to old and that sort of thing.
Riess: In fact, what’s happening in Hong Kong is huge high-rises, right?
Kriken: Um-hmm.
Riess: Are they part of this fabric that you’re talking about?
Kriken: Well, it is a fabric, but instead of the increment being four stories, or three
stories over parking, like in San Francisco, it’s forty stories. And they’re big
giant blocks, and they’re all about exactly the same height. One might be pink,
and one might be beige, but they’re all forty stories high. And they all cut off
exactly the same height.
Riess: Is what you encounter in Hong Kong different from Shanghai, would you say?
Kriken: Yes. Shanghai, the individuality of buildings in Shanghai is mostly relegated to
offices. The residential: they still have these big simple blocks for the
residential. I think they’re much more comfortable with that.
Riess: It is an issue with individuality? They don’t want it or need it?
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Kriken: Right. The peculiarity there is that the office buildings are trying so hard to be
different; every top of every office building is some little object, some unique
object. And when you get them all together, it does not bring any individual
identity, it looks like a collective… I mean they might all have been flat roofs; it
would have been the same look as all these little sculptural treatments. And so
that’s interesting too. Why did they do that? I thought it was just the funniest
thing. I remember I was interviewed on television one time, and I said, “All of
your buildings have bizarre haircuts: they all are like people with spiked hair,
and curly hair, and every conceivable thing, standing around.” But nobody
ever explained, and nobody said, No, that’s not true. I still don’t have an
answer to that. But people still do it. I once talked to a group of professors from
Tong-ji University in Shanghai about why they’d line these streets with tall
buildings, and then there’d be a transit stop. But instead of the buildings
spreading out away from the transit stop and street in a comfortable walking
distance in all four directions, they just strip development out along the streets.
And I said, “Why is that? Why are you doing that? Why aren’t you making
pedestrian transit-oriented neighborhoods, of buildings and density?” And
they were talking about it, and it was going on and on, and one of them said,
“Well, maybe it’s our fascination with dragon forms.” You know, the dragon is
this sort of curling object, and that the street name--because most of these are
famous streets in Shanghai--is still more important from an identity perspective
than the transit station, the spot that would organize walkable district.
Riess: Interesting that they would hypothesize that, with some sort of humor?
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Kriken: Well, the dragon is a positive form. And a street name that’s famous, even if it
has a thousand buildings on it, it still creates in their mind more identity than
something that is walkable--that has a kind of walkable district-like character.
Although I must say, that’s, little by little, changing. As the city continues to
grow, this thickness along these streets gets deeper. It does not remain only one
building deep.
Riess: Do you think more listening is needed in dealing with clients in foreign places
than here?
Kriken: I’m not even sure I would think my San Francisco experience is applicable in
San Antonio, or something as near as that. So I really don’t think it’s exactly
transferable to any other culture in the world.
Riess: That’s hard. You’re saying it’s possible to misstep, all the time.
Kriken: Um-hmm. You know I always think that you can create a framework where
you can get people to agree that it’s accomplishing its mission. And of course, I
always have identity missions as part of my goal, in any given place. But by
working with them, and talking, and so forth, you can get a kind of a structure.
And then, at least in my mind, it seems correct that you don’t nail everything
down, but you create room for the really particular, unique cultural needs they
have, whether it’s arcades, or small gathering places versus large gathering
places, there’s a way that they can customize it finally, with their own hand.
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And I’m just there to provide a way of approaching it and providing a
structure for it.
Riess: So, what they do in the customizing, that becomes the identity?
Kriken: That’s part of the identity. I mean, I think the streets and the other things--
views, and protecting or preserving natural features, or historic preservation--
all those become part of it too. It isn’t just one thing. You can get identity by the
way a place responds to the climate--maybe we’ve talked about this before--the
way a particular part of the world desires privacy, or community; the way they
respond to their natural features: mountains, or waterways, or lakes, and
forests--all those different things. And then sometimes manmade features, or
human-made features, like bridges, objects of the public that represent the
community, in a way--not the individual building so much. But see, in Hong
Kong, I guess, this repetitive building type is a public thing, and they see it as,
That’s my city--as opposed to, That’s my house--or something like that.
Riess: I’m thinking feng shui, or however we pronounce it. Maybe the entire city has
a kind of feng shui.
Kriken: Yeah. Well, and its parts too. I remember working in Iran, when we made
parcel sizes; parcel sizes are like lots within blocks--they had to represent the
proportions of carpets, because those are desirable proportions.
Riess: That would be the module.
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Kriken: Because they are perceived to be attractive and desirable shapes. In China, a
parcel--you never want to have a parcel that is wider at the street side than it is
at the back side, so it makes a kind of an opening like a wedge. And the reason
is because money will flow out. You have to have the blocks narrower at the
front, and flare at the back, so that it’s like a bag of money that stays there. It
can’t leave. So we do that.
Riess: But, you became aware of that by somebody actually telling you, or…
Kriken: Yeah. Oh yeah.
Riess: …by stumbling?
Kriken: A lot of times it was just talking, and trying to get these answers. I really can
think of a lot of examples, and maybe we should have these in here, because
they are of interest. And I don’t do this in my book that much. But I thought--in
the city of Isfahan there is a huge open space in the center of the city. And it’s
framed by, comparatively speaking, very low edges--totally antithetical to
European public space, where you’re always trying to create the space
definition by some ratio of the height of the wall to the width of the open space.
And in Isfahan you--finally ask, Why are all the walls so low? And some wise
person will tell you the reason is that the people are in their homes in the heat
of the day, and in the evening they come out. And they want to be in a space
that is free of the sun’s radiating heat from walls into the open space. The walls
are something to be minimized, so that the heat radiating back into the space is
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Riess: Yeah.
minimized. This makes the coolest possible space to be in, in the evening hours.
And it makes such perfect sense. And it’s so completely different than the way
we would approach making a public space in a temperate climate. That’s a
climate variation. And so cold climates are one thing, hot climates are another
thing. And they’re wonderful things to play off, and to think about, and to be
able to read when you visit a place.
Kriken: But I had to learn, whatever I know now, I definitely had to learn it. You can’t
intuit all those things.
Riess: Who is the theoretical person at Berkeley? Chris Alexander, who studied space
and pattern language?
Kriken: Well, he did that pattern language.
Riess: Is that kind of what you’re talking about? Pattern language?
[Tape 7: Side B]
Kriken: It is, in a way, although I had one argument with Chris Alexander, and that
was his idea that each pattern is an optimal relationship between things. And
that if you really understand these optimal relationships, they all can be
optimized and assembled together in a house or a city. And while I think I do a
similar thing in terms of taking great pleasure out of understanding what are
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Riess: Yes.
desirable relationships for the different elements of a city, to me, I’ve never
been able to put them together without dealing with some level of trade-off
between the accomplishment of one set of relationships and another set of
relationships. And that’s really what makes cities interesting and fun, that
there’s these little biases from one thing or another that are brought a little bit
more forward.
Kriken: But one way to think about places, and how they come together, is Alexander’s
work. I’m sure it was an influence on my thinking, but I enjoyed the difficult
but interesting choice-making, to make it all work. And I don’t know that he’s
ever had to make that many things work. I think he has been able to stay in
that abstract, academic, pedagogical structure that he created.
Riess: Well, obviously I don’t know a lot about him.
Kriken: I’ve been on panels with him, and he has quite an ego. He is an excellent
speaker but he has to be the first speaker or the last speaker. He cannot speak
in between.
Riess: One thing that you said earlier: you said that cities have their boom times, and
then their quiescent times, or whatever. I was in Chicago about ten years ago,
and I noticed there were no cranes in the sky, and it was wonderful not to have
that building chaos. What is going on in San Francisco right now? I’ve never
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seen so much building in this city as I suddenly see. Back to this notion of
recessions and booms--in fact, we are in a recession, aren’t we?
Kriken: When times have been down in San Francisco, it hasn’t lasted too long, as I said
earlier. I did make a map once of San Francisco’s downtown area. It was an old
map; I was going to throw it away, but I thought, Oh, I’m going to scribble in a
magic marker all the places that have changed since 1970, since I’ve been here.
And it was amazing how many large parts and small parts of the downtown
area have changed. Everybody thinks cities are more or less permanent, that
they’re not changing in any substantially dangerous or careless way. But they
are changing, and in huge, large-scale ways. I guess it’s good people don’t
sense it because they might freak out to see how fast things are transitioning. It
is like a living organism almost. And I think a lot about that too--I mean this is
another difference, if I may say, between architecture and urban design. An
architect might start to combine things in ways so that pieces can’t be changed
over time without having to tear the whole building down. It doesn’t break
down into parts, pieces that you can trade out and rebuild over time. This has
to be considered. And almost nobody… Most of us trained in architecture think
of our buildings as basically lasting forever, or for a long time, anyway. And
they are not interested in their project changing out over time--independent of
their own hand.
Riess: But as an urban designer?
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Kriken: You want things to be able to change, no matter. It could be for the best, it
could be for the worst, but just as you know that there’s a real problem you
have to solve right now, you know that in twenty, thirty years somebody is
going to be looking at this and trying to figure out a way to see if it can play
another role than the one that you had thought so important at the time.
Riess: That’s a really big difference.
Kriken: I think so.
Riess: Maybe if you’re living in San Francisco you really don’t see it. Because I come
across on the Bay Bridge, I’m the one who sees the low, older part, and the new
skyscrapers, and the high-rises in the middle. The city has a really interesting
profile, approached from the east.
Kriken: I think people know that things are going on south of Market now, but Golden
Gateway, Yerba Buena Center were two huge patches. And then there’s a lot
around Civic Center that have been traded out and rebuilt.
Riess: Is there someone who’s maintaining a master model of all of this?
Kriken: You know, we now have a computer model that’s pretty accurate.
Riess: Is that something I can look at online?
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Kriken: No. It’s proprietary, and it’s great for our clients. I’m drawing a tall building in
some location in the city, and then we can look at it from anywhere in the city
or Bay Area. And all with the background more or less accurate to show its
relationship to everything else. It’s really a great tool. And it’s good for the
public too, so they can get a realistic look at how it impacts the surrounding
areas.
Riess: Your client might come in to look at it.
Kriken: Yes, and actually we might use it for a public presentation. We have made this
proprietary tool available to the city planning department, but only them.
Riess: There’s a sweet handshake.
Kriken: Oh, they can use the tool against us, or anybody, if they don’t think what’s
[Tape 8: Side A]
being developed is appropriate.
Riess: [I want to return to your book. Tell me again its current status.]
Kriken: I may have mentioned this to you, but [Richard Rapaport] has helped me make
the book incredibly readable and accessible to the public. It’s completely
without jargon. I think my parents could understand it, which is always my
standard of accessibility. [laughs] Anyway, I’m very happy about that. We had
somebody come in last week to put it in a consistent format, and then we will
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make an intermediate dummy, the artwork together with the written word.
Then we will do captions, and we will be able to send it off to the publisher. So
we’re getting closer and closer.
Riess: I look forward to reading the book!
Kriken: By the way, I did look at your list of questions, and I was just sketching little
notes.
Riess: We talked about so much that was interesting last time, and I want to get the
order straight. You became a full design partner in 1984 and that meant that
you went to the partners’ meeting in Venice. How are those meetings set up?
How do you bond with partners from the other offices? What is the order of
business? Is part of the agenda to make the entire SOM operation a worldwide
one?
Kriken: Things have possibly changed somewhat. But the way I believe it still operates
is that there are smaller committees within the national or international
partnership that meet on a monthly or bi-monthly, or some kind of schedule, or
have conference phone calls on a regular basis. But there are two full partner
meetings where all the partners get together--it’s the spring and the fall--and in
the spring, traditionally, we have gone often to exotic and interesting places,
interesting cities, cities that have architects there that we have relationships
with. When we went to Japan, for example, we had all the most famous
architects of Japan joining us for dinner, things of that sort. We invite spouses,
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so it is a connecting on a social basis. The fall meeting is looking at the year’s
progress, because that’s tax time and end of fiscal year. So that’s more of a
business-type meeting.
Riess: This first time in Venice, can you remember it well enough to give me your
feeling? What struck you about the whole entity that you had perhaps not
realized as a San Francisco partner?
Kriken: When I first joined the partnership I had been to some kind of national partner
meetings, so I did have a little bit of a sense of what it’s like to have the whole
partnership together.
Riess: Would frictions be in evidence? Or is it quite polite?
Kriken: One of the things that would probably amaze people outside of SOM is the
degree of competitiveness inside the firm. And you would sometimes get the
feeling that people are much more interested in climbing up over some other
partner to succeed, as opposed to our competitors in the outside world. But
that’s just human nature, especially with a group of people who have made it
to the partnership. They are very, very ambitious, and competitive, and see
every other person probably as somebody that they want to--I shouldn’t
probably say anything like this but, they’re competitive, and they want to be
more of whatever it is than anybody else is. And sometimes that can be very
painful, internal conflicts in the firm that we have to find ways to calm down.
But that definitely is part of it.
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Riess: How do you find ways to calm things down? Were there managing partners
with particular skills in that?
Kriken: I think it gets taken care of. Sometimes the people who are involved in these
things just simply crash. They leave the partnership. That happens. And
sometimes it can just be worked out in some way. But there’s something of it
going on all the time. When I think of the profession at large, many architects
have a hard time being friends with other architects. It’s amazing to say this,
but simply because there’s not that much work, we’re always competing with
each other. It’s not like attorneys who always seem to be saying, “My good
friend and esteemed colleague,” and all this sort of thing. Architects would bite
their tongue off before they would say that. I don’t know what it is, but I think
it’s the culture. And so I think what happens at SOM is a little bit of a
microcosm of something of the larger profession.
Riess: Well, that’s interesting. Architecture school, is that where it begins, do you
think--one against one?
Kriken: I’m not sure it’s in the education, I think it’s in the--what do I want to say?--the
genes of the person. I think many people are very successful working with
other people. Actually I like to think of myself that way. For example, I always
feel that it’s the larger team that can bring the project, or the design idea, to
some new level that hadn’t been even imagined by myself, leading the team.
The most combative partners that I know from Skidmore also have great teams
working with them. They’re just different teams. It’s like sports. There are very
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good team players. I can think of a big group of people who were utterly
devoted to these partners. It was their team, you know, and they were like an
office within the larger office of Skidmore. And they had wonderful internal
interaction.
Riess: I can see how that could be. Just so everyone knew what position they were
Kriken: Yeah.
playing on the team.
Riess: When you went to partners’ meetings did you group together by offices? Was
there some sense of us against them?
Kriken: Maybe more likely in the fall meeting, when we would talk about profitability
of each office. But in the spring meeting it was very strongly social, and very
congenial.
Riess: When you talk about profitability, would the office have prepped itself as to
what they might ask, so that there would be a united front there?
Kriken: It really had to do, in a comparative basis, with how well each office was doing,
and the amount of partner support each office had in relationship to the
income it earned. Always New York and Chicago were more or less competing
with each other for first place. And San Francisco was always third, no matter
what. [laughs] It was not a source of pride for us. We wanted to be at that level,
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ut we just didn’t have the market to support the kinds of efforts that they
were making. It’s much different now, because we have a lot of work overseas,
and in Asia. The same relationships have continued, but all the offices are just
simply much stronger now than they were in my day.
Riess: You gave me a list of people you particularly chose to talk about: Chuck
Bassett, Larry Doane, Carolina Woo, Craig Hartman, Phil Enquist. Is this a time
to talk about them as individuals?
Kriken: Let me just pick a few of them to start with. Phil Enquist worked for me--we
can get the exact time, but something like fifteen years, and he likes to even tell
people that I mentored him. And if that’s, in fact, true, I couldn’t have picked
anybody better, because he is the future of whatever we achieved in the subject
area of urban design in my professional time with Skidmore. He is continuing
it, and hopefully bringing it even to a higher level.
Riess: And Roger Kallman? He is noted as the urban design partner in London.
Kriken: Roger has a wonderful skill, and he contributes in another way; he is
unequaled in working through the review and approvals process in England
and Europe. He has also directed some important large-scale projects.
Riess: I was trying to shape this question around what gets generated at a partners’
meeting: the good things, the bad things, finding sympathetic people. Or
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maybe the social aspects are not--that’s not where you would pick up your
new, best ally in the firm.
Kriken: I viewed my partners as mostly very good professionals; I had high respect for
them. But only a few of them, I think this would be true for most of us, are
what we would call really close friends. I think that there are close personal
relationships among some, but for the most part, our connection with each
other is professional. And probably that’s partly a kind of a safety factor,
because bad things happen, and you don’t want to be destroyed because
something goes wrong with one of the people that you really care for, and
then…
Riess: Do managing partners grow out of the design partners? Or are they a totally
other kind of person?
Kriken: Often they begin in the design studio, working under a design partner. And I
won’t say everybody does this, but certainly when I first joined the firm that
was a very strong pattern. And then there was a moment when that person
might be approached, and in a meeting with that person, they would say, We
like what you’re doing very much. But if you would like to have a future with
our firm, we are going to ask you to go into management rather than design.
And for some people that would throw them for a loop; and for other people
that would be fine, they would have great comfort and interest in that.
Riess: Who would be the “they”?
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Kriken: It would be somebody in the partner/associate partner group; I guess you’d
call the leadership for the firm.
Riess: And that would be firm-wide rather than local?
Kriken: No, that would be local. These would be done within each office, these kinds of
decisions.
Riess: I would think it would be the managing partner who would be the “they”--I
thought that would be the definition of managing.
Kriken: It could very well be, although if you’re talking to a young man who is a
designer, or who thinks of himself as a designer, and you’re going to tell him
that that’s not his future path, it’s better that that comes from a design partner
than from a managing partner, because the person would say, Well, if so-and-
so were here, he would feel differently. So, I think that’s the…
Riess: I can see you’ve been through it; just giving that example is beautiful. Okay.
Because I was wondering why, when you were doing the downsizing, that it
was you and Larry Doane, rather a manager.
Kriken: You know, at that time we didn’t have a managing partner. This was a time
Riess: Okay.
when just the two of us were leading San Francisco.
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Kriken: Yeah. And then we had associate partners who were managers, but not full
partners.
Riess: I’ve read a description of the partnership [Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, SOM
Since 1936, by Nicholas Adams, p. 333]. [slight break in recording] It seems to
imply that the more money you have, the more shares you can buy.
Kriken: No. That’s not correct. The shares are awarded to you, based on your merit.
Riess: So this, then, would not make any particular sense: [reading] “Partners may
own different numbers of shares that they must buy when they are invited to
become partners, and their salary is calculated based on the number of shares
they own.”
Kriken: Okay. But that… You’re awarded X number of points--or taken away points--
but if you’re awarded more points, then--you do buy them, but it comes out of
your salary. I mean it’s just so much… And then when you retire, as I am now,
that becomes your capital account, which you draw down over four or five
years. And, that becomes part of your longer-term retirement.
Riess: Over the years that you’ve been with SOM, has this been continually crafted?
Kriken: It’s constantly changing. It is. I mean the author here is correct in his
assessment that it’s a very flexible document. We used to have--last year,
before this last meeting, we had partners, and we had associate partners. And
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then we had associates. And it was decided--I wasn’t at the meeting, so I have
no idea why: there are still partners, and then they’ve made a class that were
formerly, some of them were like discipline partners, they call them directors.
Riess: Discipline partners!
Kriken: To make the partner group even more special. And what were called associate
partners are now associate directors. So you tell me. On a yearly basis there can
be little changes like this. One of the changes we did when I was partner was to
develop a much more transparent and open evaluation and compensation, or
compensation and evaluation committee. It used to be done by the three
highest-ranking partners, and there was no methodology to it at all, except
some notion of did they like you, or did they not like you? Which is probably--I
don’t know if that happens in other firms. But what we tried to do is develop a
set of questions that we would ask the partner to answer, and then these would
be discussed among a committee of partners, who were, I would say, never
dominated by the most senior partners. And then an approach to the
compensation was established.
Riess: Did it take a lot of your time? Sounds like it would.
Kriken: That group would meet maybe three or four times a year. It wasn’t--it wasn’t
an every day thing. Also, some partners move between offices, so Phil Enquist
was here, now he’s in Chicago. Brian Lee was here, now he’s in Chicago. Both
of them are design partners, but Phil is more in urban design.
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Riess: They are called to go there?
Kriken: Because of the need for people of their background and experience.
Riess: So in that way, it’s one entity.
Kriken: Yeah. I was very lucky. I think we talked about this once.
Riess: You said that you had been offered Iran.
Kriken: Yeah. A hotel room in Tehran. [laughs] That was a place they’d like me to work
for a few years.
Riess: That could have been threatening.
Kriken: Well, you know, as it turned out, it would have. I can’t say what it would have
been like to be there, but it wouldn’t have lasted so very long, because the
Shah, two years later, was deposed.
Riess: And a bit more about the downturn; did you see it coming?
Kriken: Well, to say we saw it coming… Obviously we didn’t see it long term; we saw
it coming as it started, as jobs started shutting down, one-by-one.
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Riess: Nick Adams in his book [p. 42] says 1985 to 1995 was not an easy decade. “The
firm started awash in money, bloated with success. Near bankruptcy around
1990 took an immense toll. Individual partners had taken advantage of looser
AIA regulations and joined developers in investing in buildings. Long-term
contracts for office space had been signed, and these could not be broken
without incurring high costs.” He describes the reduced work force and so on.
So it must have been even more dramatic in the other offices?
Kriken: It couldn’t have been more dramatic than in San Francisco. So I think it was
across the board.
Riess: “For the first time the partners agreed to have a chairman.” That was David
Childs.
Kriken: It was always committee-run before. But because of the situation, we needed to
have a chair so we could react quickly, if there was a lawsuit or something; we
just couldn’t call together a committee and do all the stuff you would have to
do, time-wise, to make quick decisions for the firm. And some partners
resigned, because of just the pall of being in a situation like this. Although it
wouldn’t have protected them from a bankruptcy suit, the banks [suing to get]
their money back.
Riess: Another SOM book I’ve looked at is by Abby Bussel, called SOM Evolutions,
published in 2000.
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Kriken: I don’t know that.
Riess: She’s keen on the new SOM, calls it collaborative, studio-based, multi-
disciplinary. Where it was a monolith, it is now diverse, vibrant, progressive.
That’s a positive spin on what happened. It also suggests that you have new
structural policies that make it diverse, vibrant, and progressive.
Kriken: I do think we have the most talented group of architects and planners since I
[Tape 8: Side B]
first joined in 1970.
Riess: Are you saying they are coming out of school better prepared?
Kriken: You could say we’re able to bring them into the firm, even as they’ve done
some of their early work with other offices. And it’s not just the firm that’s
changed, but it’s the whole environment of doing architecture, in that there is
more interest now in doing work that can depart more from the normal context
of even high-level architectural design. And so there’s more room to
experiment. The ‘80s were awful, because it was the height of Postmodernism,
and everything was about heaviness, and almost decorativeness. It just killed
the Modernist spirit of Skidmore, which Bunshaft and others had established,
and which created such a high profile for the firm. And then it just went
crashing down. But it was interesting. It was almost impossible to get jobs if
you didn’t do this sort of decorative treatment; people thought anything that
was Modern was too cold, and too inhuman, and too kind of stand-offish.
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Riess: Did real honest-to-goodness people think that? Or is that the critics?
Kriken: The point of view of that statement is from our clients.
Riess: And how do they form their aesthetic, or whatever?
Kriken: Well, it’s not surprising that people who are developers of buildings have their
libraries filled with books on architects and buildings. And when they see a
particular attitude being very successful in the marketplace, then they want
more of that. One of the things that so classically defines the practice is that our
clients are a little bit unadventurous, in that whenever there’s a successful idea,
then it gets copied thousands of times, or hundreds of times anyway. It’s, Why
take a risk when you’re dealing with millions of dollars. Why not take the safer
bet. Often people come to SOM to get something more, either more in terms of
craft, or more in terms of image making. We like to think we compete with
Renzo Piano and Norman Foster, and all those people. But because they are
individuals, and we are a firm, I think they still stand out in people’s minds
more than the work of Craig Hartman, for example.
Riess: So that’s why people like Renzo Piano and Norman Foster almost are
Kriken: Um-hmm.
guaranteed to make the next new thing.
Riess: Because there’s a commitment to that individual’s name, even by a developer.
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Kriken: Yeah. It’s terrible when you think about name branding as part of the
marketing of the building. But if you look at the New York Times magazine’s
real estate section, you’ll see the architect’s name right up there with the
doorman, views, and building by Richard Meyer.
Riess: So the general public too, really everyone’s on speaking terms with these
names now.
Kriken: Um-hmm. Everybody. And SOM has absolutely nothing to complain about.
Everybody knows Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, even people who have almost
no interest in architecture. I can, at almost any cocktail party, of any group of
people, of any mix, if I say where I work, they all say, Oh, I know Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill. So it’s a brand name, too.
Riess: I don’t know whether you’ve gotten to your New York Times today [March 3,
2008].
Kriken: I did, I read that Rem Koolhaas thing. This Nicolai Ouroussoff--however you
pronounce his last name…
Riess: Yes, the architecture critic of New York Times.
Kriken: You know there was a love feast in the beginning, about how wonderful this
project is. And then a critique in the last two or three paragraphs about how
this could end up being a gated community.
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Riess: Let’s give this a name, what we’re talking about.
Kriken: Okay. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s a development, a large-scale development, in
Dubai, planned by Rem Koolhaas. And it does represent one of the things that
is happening in the design world that I find very troubling, and very
problematic, because it’s--in almost every respect, anti-city. And against all the
things that I value in livability and making a good city. [laughing] Someday you
can read my book and you’ll see what I’m talking about. But it nevertheless
persists. And I, of course, have been in competitions with, and even on large
teams with, Koolhaas, and I’m always just shocked, because of the way he
thinks about land uses, or the physical relationships between uses, it bears
absolutely no connection with function, efficiency, sustainability, or livability.
Riess: What would you assume--there was not a competition for this?
Kriken: I assume not.
Riess: Somebody in Dubai said, Well, we’ll have Koolhaas.
Kriken: Um-hmm. Again, it’s a branding thing. And you know what Dubai is? It’s very
close to becoming a Disneyland.
Riess: To a Disneyland.
Kriken: Um-hmm. It’s a fantasy, and it’s the world’s largest real estate bubble.
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Riess: Ouroussoff doesn’t deal with the gated community aspect until the end, where
he says, “It turns the logic of the gated community on its head. Isolation
becomes a way to trap urban energy, rather than keep it out.”
Kriken: It’s 1984. It seems like propaganda. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not
thoughtful criticism about livable cities.
Riess: But I didn’t mean to change the subject, except we were talking about
branding. So this would be a good example of thoughtlessly calling on a name
brand.
Kriken: Yes, it would be.
Riess: It doesn’t have to be Koolhaas. When we first met I told you I had been reading
about big master plans, urban schemes, it seemed nearly every two weeks,
either in the architecture section, or in the business section. You must be aware
of how firms are chosen. I think that’s where my question is going, when they
choose to have competitions, and who chooses to have a competition? Is it the
developer? Or has the developer already picked his architect?
Kriken: Competitions: sometimes developers do it. But I really find that offensive,
because they’re just trying to get free services, or to get your main ideas
without having to pay for them. But often it’s also cities that create a
competition environment.
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Riess: And that’s a good thing.
Kriken: Well, it’s better. It’s a little bit better, because you could say there’s a public
interest in what the choices are at a large development scale, and that’s at least
one way to raise those questions. And then they can pick the group that has
more possibility of continuing in a direction they’re interested in.
Riess: Of course one could just pick SOM, and be safe?
Kriken: Cities have to be careful that an architect selection could not be construed as a
conflict of interest, or in some way an inappropriate process that was not open
and clear. And so I have less trouble with that. A developer can absolutely
choose. A lot of times I would rather have a city look at past work and ideas
that the architect/planner has addressed, or considered, or was concerned
with. And then based on how well that fit their ultimate needs, make the
choice, rather than causing five different firms to work with almost no
background information, to try to speculate in the most crude way what the
future of something might be. This used to happen in China all the time, where
somebody would do a very thoughtful piece of work, and they would be
trounced by somebody who did some figural thing, like a circle with a spike in
it. And everybody would say, Gee, that’s really exciting. You know, just some
graphic on a piece of paper, totally without human scale, or function, or any
purpose. It depends who the jury is, and their ability to make those
distinctions. And see, that would also be my criticism with this [Dubai plan]. A
good city is not about imageful objects. It’s much more complex than that.
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Riess: Really.
There may be landmarks as a part of your strategy, but it doesn’t have to be a
sphere or a pinwheel, or a circle, or a crescent. Anyway, I have this reaction
when I think about all the times I’ve lost to people that have done
professionally irresponsible work, using techniques like drawing big bull’s-
eyes, or circles, it’s amazing. It is a truism that if you draw a circle on a plan,
the client will pick it.
Kriken: And it’s just because they can remember it. When they walk away, and they go
home that night, and they’re thinking about all the things they saw that day, a
circle is memorable. In the Philippines there was a project that developed a
series of circles for the road system, so that the city was made of a series of
rings of buildings. I cannot imagine something more disorienting, more
problematic from a user point of view, than having streets go 360 degrees, and
to find yourself on them without a means of orientation; the tall buildings were
built like walls, so that when you threw a shadow on the buildings it was a
powerful circle, it wasn’t just…
Riess: It probably looked good to God, or something.
Kriken: Yeah, it looked good from above. But it would be horrible. But, of course, that’s
the one simple, memorable thing that the jury took home with them, and they
gave the project to them--to the people who used the circle. So I tell my
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students, “You’d better be careful if you want to do something with a circle in
it. Because if you draw it, it will be picked.” [laughs]
Riess: Were you on the team for the Transbay Transit Center competition?
Kriken: Um-hmm.
Riess: What happened there?
Kriken: Excuse me. No. I headed the team that created the opportunity for a tall
building, together with a grouping of tall buildings around the transit station.
Working with Ellen Lou we planned a new high density residential
neighborhood.
Riess: What is SOM’s role now? You didn’t win, right?
Kriken: No, we did not win. That’s another interesting problem, because the winning
scheme had a park seventy feet in the air. [laughs] I find that all you have to do
is have a certain amount of green; that will also bring you a very high public
approval benefit.
Riess: I certainly would be interested in knowing about the Transbay Transit Center. I
went to the SOM website and I saw the drawings, and it pained me to realize
that the whole account was being written in the past tense, what they would
have done. What happened there? How do you get so far down a road that
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seems like such a great investment of money? How do you get that back? You
never do.
Kriken: Never do. Often we end up investing in a competition like that, one way or
another, just to make it so special, but also the developer is normally paying us
to some level, so that it’s just--what do you call it? You made a bet and you lost,
kind of thing.
Riess: You were doing it for the city, or for a developer?
Kriken: We were doing it--well, what I did was for the city.
Riess: Okay. What is it that you did?
Kriken: What I did was to, let’s just say, create the rationale, the argument, for doing
some very tall buildings on the southern edge of downtown, in lands that were
not occupied, partly publicly-owned by the Caltrans, and by the city. And the
idea was to create the highest amount of public money that could be raised out
of that publicly owned real estate to pay for the future Caltrain station,
including moving Caltrain from its current location on 4 th Street and King to
the downtown Mission Street location. And to do it in a way that represented
the best aspects of transit-oriented development, and actually to show that
buildings of this height improve the skyline. And that they’re not throwing
shadows on public parks, or doing something that by city law we are to avoid.
So my plan was setting up the opportunity for the Transbay Terminal
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Authority. They created the competition, and we were one of the entrants in
the competition, and our client was the Rockefeller group.
Riess: “Setting this up for the city,” they paid you to do this.
Kriken: Yes. It was the city that came to us, that asked us to help them think that
through. When we were planning the larger South of Market neighborhood, I
said, “Let’s do fewer taller buildings, so that we can get sunlight and views.”
You remember we talked about that? So the buildings would be spaced further
apart. And everybody was stunned: all the people who have always hated tall
buildings thought that the transit-oriented idea was good. They saw that the
sunlight was good; the views were good; we were adding parks, et cetera. And
so for the first time, there was a positive reaction to change of that kind for the
city of San Francisco. So I think that helped set me up to examine the Transbay
Tower, and where they wanted to go beyond what we had shown in our
previous plan, to see if we could get more revenue to pay for the terminal by
the sale of the land. And indeed, the difference between the scheme we did for
Rockefeller, and the winning scheme, was money. I think our scheme was
going to pay a hundred and something million dollars, and theirs was going to
pay three hundred million dollars for the land. I won’t say it wasn’t about
design, but money played a very big role in the selection process.
Riess: What’s the team that won?
Kriken: Jerry Hines [Gerald D.].
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Riess: Oh yes. Where are they based?
Kriken: Jerry Hines is from Houston but has an office in San Francisco. And we’ve
worked with them over the years. I went to China right after Nixon lifted the
trade barriers, to work on a World Trade Center for Beijing for Jerry Hines.
Riess: Jerry Hines was the developer. What was the design team that won for
Transbay Transit Center?
Kriken: Oh, the design team that won was led by the architect Cesar Pelli.
Riess: That’s an old relationship: SOM and Rockefeller.
Kriken: Well, it would be a New York relationship.
Riess: But I mean Nat Owings.
Kriken: Through Nat Owings, and then the Mauna Kea Hotel that Marc worked on. So,
it is a name that goes way back. They, of course, were partners with the
Embarcadero Center, with Portman as architect.
Riess: I was looking at the SOM website, at what services the office offers. It’s
interesting, all these expertises: architecture, graphics, interiors…
Kriken: Structural engineering, sustainable design, urban design.
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Riess: But these are all separate offerings.
Kriken: Yeah. In fact a client can say, “I have my own structural engineer; I’d like you
to work with them.” Or “I have my own mechanical, electrical, and plumbing.”
San Francisco does not have MEP anymore, but I think Chicago has. We have
structural, interiors, graphics, and urban design. I guess we have something
called sustainable design, but that’s something new as a subject area.
Eventually that’ll just get folded in, because it’ll be assumed that architecture
and city planning will both contain the subject of sustainable design.
Riess: And urban design and planning breaks out from architecture.
Kriken: Well, first of all, I wouldn’t necessarily say that urban design and planning are
completely independent from architecture. Architectural services are the
economic center. We don’t deliver, contribute, as much economically to the
office. But we deliver a lot in the way of visibility and prestige, and often our
projects lead to architecture.
Riess: David Childs said--maybe this doesn’t mean the same thing--he said, “Our
greatest client over the years has been the city--work with community review
boards and agencies.”
Kriken: That’s interesting, because David has always had a strong interest in urban
design, and is extremely good at it. I also think there is an idea in the firm.
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[Tape 9: Side A]
Kriken: Frequently Bruce Graham would say that what makes us different in the
professional world is that we design cities, while most firms design buildings.
And what he meant by that, I think, is our urban design function, and he also
meant that SOM, just by its long history, has designed many buildings in most
cities. You can’t say San Francisco has been created by SOM, but we probably
have thirty or more buildings in the central business district. And they blend
nicely. They don’t look like one firm. You know, they look like they could have
been done by dozens of different people. But that’s part of designing a good
city; that it’s diverse and varied in all those good ways.
Riess: You would talk in the office about that big picture, what “we” are doing in our
city.
Kriken: Yes. Not in any sort of scheduled way, but we do. I think there’s a strong belief,
myself included, that we have to find ways to make cities maintain a compact
footprint on the land, and to make them denser, to carry a larger share of the
population growth. The quality of life will continue to deteriorate if we
continue directing that growth to suburban areas. So we all are looking at ways
to find the key to making density as good as, or better--I won’t say better--but
as good a life experience as you can have in other locations for living.
Riess: I’m not used to that idea. A New Yorker is completely used to it.
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Kriken: There are so many ways to make this very vivid, which I try to bring out to
students. In the next twenty years, everything we see in our cities is going to
expand by more than half the area of everything we see in our cities right now,
just in the next twenty years. And so where’s it going to go? This is based on
the doubling of population growth in the U.S. from three hundred million to
six hundred million.
Riess: Just minimum population growth.
Kriken: Oh it’s not so minimum; it’s doubling in twenty years. And a lot of it will
gravitate to places people think are attractive, like California, as opposed to
Detroit, which is where we should try to maintain the population that’s there,
and even enlarge it.
Riess: You said that when you were talking to the city and trying to give them some
ideas to think about when doing their master planning, that the city needed
more high-rises. I was struck by that. There’s a whole history of San Francisco
resisting high-rise buildings, and it’s a very patchy skyline now. But you think
that it would be made more graceful if it were…
Kriken: Well, I think--one of my best friends and [an] esteemed colleague is Allan
Jacobs. Allan was the city's planning director who created the city’s urban
design plan which is the most comprehensive and far- reaching design plan in
the United States. He is now an emeritus professor at UC Berkeley. In this plan
he developed a sort of a stepping down height limit, from the highest in the
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center of downtown, stepping down to the height of the surrounding
neighborhoods. And I really do believe in that, especially coming this direction
toward North Beach, where, in fact, we do want to protect the view of
Telegraph Hill and much of the prevailing scale of Nob and Russian Hill.
Riess: So that means northwest.
Kriken: Yeah, to the northwest. So that southeast, that other direction, is where, I think,
there can be taller buildings and that that stepping down theory, which is so
important for this side of the city, is not as relevant. And there should be and
could be buildings that would make that part of the city both higher density
where the transit is, but also more visually welcoming as you approach the city
from that direction, because the taller towers would be seen with sky behind
them. I think that side of the city is quite unwelcoming and depressing,
because it is like a wall. It’s like a continuous wall; it does not engage the eye.
You can see a little bit of the Transamerica, a little bit of Bank of America off in
the distance, but it is like a uniform wall.
Riess: As seen by a pedestrian or up on the Bay Bridge?
Kriken: From 280 or Potrero Hill or the Bay Bridge--well, the Bay Bridge is a little bit
different, but even 101 coming in, you’re seeing the twist of the street
geometries, so that you can’t see space or sky between the buildings, it’s just
dark and forbidding.
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Riess: Did Allan Jacobs think the stepping-down should have applied also on this
side?
Kriken: On this southeast side, yes, he did. Again, assuming that there’s not an adverse
impact on parks and things of that sort.
Riess: With that very tall building (One Rincon) right next to the Bay Bridge,
suddenly it’s like the Bay Bridge tower is another tall building in some way.
Kriken: For this theory about how this side of the city might develop, probably the
worst thing that could happen was that tower being built all by itself. It would
have been so much more satisfactory if the tallness started close to the city and
then worked its way toward the freeway. And instead, that one tall, lone
building; it looks so unfinished, and as you say, fragmented and not coherent
in any way. That will change, but it’s still unfortunate.
Riess: When you talk about populations and what you have to think about for the
future, you certainly have to be thinking about that in China. I don’t know how
you get your mind around that, how you plan for a world when you come right
down to it, since the impact of population is so horrendous.
Kriken: Well, I’ll tell you. The experience in China has made all of us aware of the
problem of adapting huge populations to cities, and if I haven’t told you
before, the extremes that can happen. And the most graphic is Hong Kong
where we have eight million people, and we have eight million people in the
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Bay Area region. Hong Kong is so dense it would fit in two-thirds the size of
San Francisco. So people--people adapt, and people are not, I would say,
unhappy there, because they can get around. You can travel anywhere in
fifteen minutes. It’s culturally deprived, although they’re trying to improve
that. It’s always been a place to make money. As a young person you come to
make money and then you leave and go live in a city that has all of the
amenities that you would otherwise expect in a city of that size.
Riess: But given that fact, what? We take comfort in that?
Kriken: I think Hong Kong stands as simply a visualization of an extreme to which we
hope we never have to go, but it’s a way of visualizing what you would do if
that’s the only thing you had to meet your population size, and you didn’t
have any intervening ways of shaping the city to meet all the other qualities for
livability in a dense environment. I believe it’s a very important subject to think
about. Not that you would ever wish to reproduce a Hong Kong. It’s like Paolo
Soleri’s Arcosanti. It’s the city as a beehive. It’s almost inconceivable the ends
to which people can be moved to go if the land is so scarce and the number of
people so large that there’s no other choice.
Riess: Well, your life would be about something other than your house, I guess. For
me, the space that I inhabit is hugely important. So do you get a different sense
of what’s important, then?
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Kriken: I think you do. And I’m still trying--my whole book is about this problem.
How we can maintain livability and still build more ecologically sustainable
living places. One cannot say that suburbs won’t continue to exist, because they
will.
Riess: Well, and livability--there have been cultures living in freezing temperatures
and cultures in deserts. I guess you really do have to become a bit of a
philosopher here.
Kriken: China has been very important in seeing the way people are trying to come to
terms with their population explosions, and the ways that have failed, and the
ways that give a glimmer of hope about how people might find better ways to
live on the land.
Riess: I was going to--my question here is, Was the work abroad that you did, that the
firm did, a place to practice working out design problems that you could
translate into solutions for this country, and vice versa?
Kriken: Mm-hmm, yes. That’s certainly part of the answer. I think population is one
confrontation that most Americans haven’t addressed or had to address, except
perhaps people who practice in New York City or Chicago. But the whole idea
of regional impacts of people on the land, and how to manage that in terms of
accessibility, and sunlight in parks, and open space and all the rest of it, I think,
is the challenge ahead.
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Riess: It sounds like you really believe that sunlight and parks and open space are
essential. What makes you even think they’re essential?
Kriken: I’m not sure they’re essential, but I believe they’re essential. [laughter] I think
about back in the days of the City Beautiful movement, and all the landscape
architects would write treatises on the importance of parks to physical and
mental health. I have come to feel that there is some relationship between--I
call it the presence of nature in the built world; there’s a balance between the
presence of nature and hardscape--the shelter-creating and buildings that we
make on the land. That presence of nature might be seeing the sky, which some
Vietnamese pointed out to me when I took them around to various American
cities. They liked it when there was spacing between towers. They thought that
spacing buildings was an important way to plan higher density--spacing
buildings to see the blue sky. And I thought, My God, I’ve never thought of
that. I think about sunlight, but not about seeing blue sky. When you’re on
certain streets in New York where buildings have zero setback, with
continuous height on both sides of the street, the sky is basically limited to
whatever is at the end of the street. You’re not getting any sky within your
cone of vision, walking down the street. They saw that instantly; it was the
presence of nature. I never thought of that up until that time.
Riess: I was going to ask whether this wasn’t a Western thing that you were reflecting
on, but you can see it’s a universal thing.
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Kriken: I hope most of the ideas that have to do with livability are universal, with the
exception of how they are modified by climate, geography, and culture. And
the culture is usually how people deal with being in a community or deal with
their own privacy. So that you get very different approaches from desert
Middle Eastern cities than you get from temperate climate, more Western
cities. It has to do with how open they are to the outside, or closed to the
outside. And that, interestingly, has a kind of parallel in terms of the weather,
because you close to the outside anyway, just to defend yourself from the sun’s
heat. So there might be more going on in terms of behavioral notions between
hot climates and cooler climates than just religion or some other factor that we
tend to think of.
Riess: What do you read that helps you think about all this?
Kriken: Well, I’d like to be able to reel off a lot of books, but a lot of this is experiential.
I did a little diagram when I was working on my first new town in Iran, and I
drew a house surrounded by garden with lots of windows, and I said, “This is
the way people live in a temperate climate.” And then I drew a courtyard
house with almost no windows outside at all, which was, you might say, a
doughnut. All the windows were inward.
Riess: A doughnut?
Kriken: A doughnut. A house with a courtyard. I thought how amazingly unique that
was, because for one the sense of place was the solid and the other was the
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void. It was just a complete flip-flop. And growing up in California, I thought
most of the world, if they didn’t live like me, they should live like me. So when
I started, early in my career, getting into this desert climate impact on the way
we make cities, it just completely opened up the subject. I never think we have
the answers. There are historical places where you can study how people had a
different set of goals that are not obvious to you. Saudi Arabia was harder,
because that’s a nomadic culture. They never made cities before modern times,
so I used references from Iran.
Riess: Thank you, that’s all so very interesting. Now here’s a subject-changing
question. Were you actively encouraged by the firm here to take on your civic
roles, like arts commissioner and [San Francisco] BCDC [Bay Conservation and
Development Commission]? Was that something that the firm would want to
do? Insert people in the web of the city?
Kriken: I think most people when they achieve a certain level, they’re encouraged, but
it’s usually subjects that are very highly related to art and architecture.
Sometimes it might be the Museum of Modern Art board of directors. It could
be any number of things. In San Francisco the first organization I got involved
in came from my wife Katherine Koelsch.
Riess: I knew from your notes to me that your wife had been a Pan Am stewardess,
and as you said, a fellow world traveler.
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Kriken: I met Katherine Koelsch at a party given by architect friends. We had a long
and memorable conversation. With Pan Am she had traveled to all the places
in the world I had traveled. This included Tahiti, Pago Pago, South America,
Iran, India, and most European cities. Like me, she was a lover of cities. We
first met in 1979 and married in 1988.
Riess: Where is she from?
Kriken: She’s from Boise, Idaho. She came to San Francisco to work after college.
Riess: What are her interests?
Kriken: Katherine is an artist and sees the world as an artist. She lived in a
neighborhood that I loved-- Telegraph Hill. At the time we met, I had moved to
a high-rise on Russian Hill. Through Katherine I met many neighbors involved
with San Francisco cultural affairs and politics, and through these friends, I
was invited to be on the board of the North of Market Planning Coalition,
Intersection for the Arts, Fort Mason Cultural Center, the San Francisco Art
Commission, and many more. This was a welcome change because until then,
San Francisco was where I lived, and most of my professional interests were
elsewhere. We moved to a 1923 home on Russian Hill. I’ve learned a lot from
my city. We both agree, it’s turned out to be a great collaboration.
Riess: Tell me about some of the organizations.
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Kriken: The North of Market Planning Coalition was the community organization for
the Tenderloin. The reason they wanted an architect on their board was to see
if they could maintain the zoning of their neighborhood to prevent it from
being wiped out by luxury hotels and gentrification.
Riess: Gentrification.
Kriken: Gentrification is the word. So that was the first, and then I decided I’d like to
see what’s going on in the art world. So somebody invited me to the board of
Intersection for the Arts in San Francisco, which was in North Beach at the
time, but then had to move down to the Mission District. They became a very
prominent arts organization, and they were almost shut down. The board--
there were about three of us on the board who wanted to be sure that it stayed
alive, and we found a new home for it. The other board members said, “It’s not
in North Beach? Forget about it.”
Riess: Was it a place where artists came together to work?
Kriken: It was--the Intersection for the Arts, as the title would suggest, was bringing
writers and musicians and actors and visual artists all together. So they’d have
performances, and they’d have different exhibitions. It was an exciting concept
and it still goes on today.
Riess: So you would be a concept person? They wouldn’t be expecting you to be the
fundraising end of things.
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Kriken: No. [chuckling] I never was good at that. Then the next board was Fort Mason.
They wanted an architect on that when they were doing a major fundraising
drive to redevelop the piers.
Riess: The Fort Mason Cultural Center.
Kriken: Yeah. And I’ve been doing that kind of thing for years.
Riess: Is it your practice to get on these things, get something done, and get off? Or do
you…
Kriken: Yeah, I think it’s pretty much where I can help, because I’m not a fundraiser, as
you point out, or as you suggest. [chuckling]
Riess: You were vice-chair of the Engineering and Design Advisory Panel for
replacement of the Bay Bridge after the 1989 earthquake?
Kriken: Yeah, that was a big one. That was a big one.
Riess: I’ll bet.
Kriken: That was reviewing the submissions for what kind of bridge to have.
Unfortunately, it was fighting against Mayor Jerry Brown of Oakland and
Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco, people from the governor’s office, and
disgruntled engineers.
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Riess: Yes. In that case your expertise--you perhaps know [Santiago] Calatrava and
all of that kind of thing.
Kriken: Well, the panel was made up of engineers and a few architects, so its purpose
was to be sure that there was an architectural integrity. The architect’s
contribution to the Golden Gate Bridge was extremely significant to its ultimate
beauty, in the tower design. And so we were very interested in the type of
bridge that was selected, as well as what that bridge would look like. And we
were the only body that reviewed it.
Riess: It is a step to the city, isn’t it?
Kriken: Yeah, it is, and Jerry Brown wanted sort of a Golden Gate Bridge that went all
the way from Oakland to here and so he was against it.
Riess: Not a Golden Gate Bridge, a Bay Bridge.
Kriken: Well, he wanted some kind of suspension bridge that would go from the
shoreline of Oakland to Yerba Buena Island. We only had that one signature
span, at the island, because it was the only place you could get a rock
foundation. So I was quoted in the paper, by [Gerald D.] Adams, as saying,
“Jerry Brown can’t wave his magic wand and turn mud into rock.” [chuckling]
Riess: That’s excellent.
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Kriken: Actually, I worked for Governor Jerry Brown, during his administration, for
the state architect, so I had a lot of regard for him.
Riess: When you take these positions, though, do you do it as a private citizen?
Kriken: Yeah, that’s as a private citizen.
Riess: But people know you’re with SOM, you’re John Kriken, SOM.
Kriken: Yes. Um-hmm.
Riess: The arts commission and the BCDC. You’ve been on them for a long time.
Kriken: Actually, the BCDC I’ve been on for a really long time. Something like
[Tape 9: Side B]
seventeen years.
Kriken: There is something important about these experiences outside the firm, and
that it is outside the firm, and it provides another perspective on the area that
we live in and the people who are involved. It’s a way to expand one’s view
and to do good work. Because a firm like SOM can be, you might say, a
complete life for most people.
Riess: I would think.
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Kriken: You could have all of your friends inside of SOM; you could have all of your
hours, both work and leisure, somehow contained within SOM. My feeling is
you really have to work at whatever these other activities are, and I encourage
everybody to do as much of it as they feel they can, because it actually engages
you in the community. I don’t want to say because it’s helpful to the firm, but it
probably does help the firm in some ways because it’s another way of being
present in your community.
Riess: That’s what I was asking, I guess.
Kriken: Um-hmm. But nobody asks you to do it.
Riess: At the firm end, nobody asks you.
Kriken: At the firm end. It’s actually just a nice way of, in most of these instances,
capturing the cultural life of the region that you’re living in.
Riess: Well, that’s how professionals used to, in some way, get their business,
through their churches or their whatever, their neighborhood affiliations.
Kriken: I have to say that there are people, of course--I’ve been on port design review
and I’ve been on all kinds of things, and I have had business dealings with
them at different points in time. So that happens too, no question about it. But
[chuckling] the motive is really to help everybody guide what they’re doing to
the best conclusion.
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Riess: But you’re saying that you’re also a good listener. You have to listen, too.
Kriken: Um-hmm.
Riess: You guided public architecture in the city during most of the 1990s, and yet
your name is not well known, is it?
Kriken: It’s true; I think people in the profession know me very well. I used to get Allan
Temko to write about controversies I would be in from time to time, but it’s
still low key. And then, just the fact that you’re in a firm called SOM and not a
firm called Kriken and Associates also, I think, contributes to the low profile.
But in every other way, I feel very satisfied that there is a positive influence
that can be brought to these things through my participation. There was a time
I was planning Fisherman’s Wharf and Mission Bay for the Art Commission. I
was reviewing the Embarcadero roadway renewal; I was on Design Review
Board of the Port; I was helping with the Presidio plans, so I was looking at
everything from the Golden Gate Bridge all the way around down to the
central waterfront and Potrero Hill. So I really did feel like a big deal. I must
say, that’s the scale of work we have in China, really.
Riess: Well, yeah, and that you could really make a difference. You could hook it all
up.
Kriken: Um-hmm. So there were moments like that that you almost don’t want people
to know that you are a link through all those different things going on, because
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instead of being just some kind of hopefully thoughtful, supporting person,
you become what is it that you--
Riess: Robert Moses?
Kriken: Not Robert Moses. I wouldn’t go that far, but you could become somebody that
maybe has too much influence, and this could possibly backfire.
Riess: I mean, is there…
Kriken: On this subject I don’t know what I’m talking about.
Riess: It sounds like a big responsibility to make all those areas work together and be
interesting. Although you don’t want the same hand, you want things to mesh,
right?
Kriken: I do want cities to be about diversity, variety, and choice. It’s architectural--you
don’t want all the buildings to look alike. I think the best cities have this sort of
visually interesting complexity, and they also have the ability for different
kinds of people to live there. One of the other issues besides population growth
is affordability. If our artists all have to live in Vallejo, they can’t live in the city
anymore, and that’s a real loss to the cultural life of the city.
Riess: That’s a terrific example of one of the things you would be thinking about.
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Kriken: Yeah. I was going to say not exactly the same way as a San Francisco
supervisor thinks about it, but I would be thinking about it. [brief pause in
recording]
Riess: Who were SOM’s strongest competitors?
Kriken: Well, you see, it’d be different in my area than in the architectural world. I
don’t compete with Norman Foster in designing cities, or I don’t compete with
Renzo Piano and any of these people on those kinds of scales. To me there are
these problems, and it’s international firms that participate in these
competitions that we talked about earlier, otherwise I don’t think too much
about it. I think with our experience--if we really want something, and we get
to focus on it, generally we can make a very good case. Sometimes our fees are
too high, sometimes people just think the firm is too big. And I try to explain
that it’s not, that it’s just seven or eight people who work together to do this
kind of thing. It’s not three hundred people.
Riess: That’s an interesting problem--they’d feel like it would be overbearing?
Kriken: Yeah, or they would lose control, or they would--in fact, overall for SOM, I
think, its competitive difficulty is its perception of being a) a very large firm,
and b) I’m not speaking about myself here, but a way of knowing the answer
before they hear the question, and to take a specific position and then make it
happen, rather than being open, to figure out all the possibilities that could
happen.
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Riess: When you meet people, do you come as a team? Or do you meet with them
first?
Kriken: Usually we come as a team.
Riess: But they’re your team. They know how to listen, too.
Kriken: Yeah, and in an interview, because it’s almost always an interview of some
kind, even if it’s a private developer, you have a certain time when they say,
“We’d like to know what your credentials are and your background.” So it’s
just how you handle that, and then they ask questions.
Riess: So when you do enter competitions, how do you get smart about which ones to
enter?
Kriken: Well, I’ll tell you, I think the stakes have to be pretty high for us to enter
competitions these days, because it’s expensive for us to do. We try to explain
to people that our ideas are what we sell, and if we tell you our ideas, all of
them, you are not adequately compensating us in a competition framework,
you’re just--usually they’re less than a fifth of what the fee would be to do the
work fully, but they get the sense of it, because we have to [chuckling] state the
opportunity as strongly as we can.
Riess: Maybe competitions are a better mode for smaller upcoming firms?
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Kriken: I think so. I’ve always said that, too.
Riess: We wanted to talk about collaborations with artists and interior designers and
photographers, but that seems like not an appropriate question, because you
wouldn’t go out of the firm for any of these people. Is that not correct?
Kriken: Well, there have been great collaborations. I think the San Antonio River
project was a collaboration between local people and ourselves. They were
artists. In San Antonio Cy Wagner was a local architect and Sherry was a writer
and exhibition consultant. They were local, they gave us the content that we
could work with, and I think we got them thinking about things, and they
certainly got us thinking about things. So I believe these are collaborations that
are expanded client groups. We’ve worked with most of the landscape
architect firms over the years, and they’ve been very successful collaborations.
But I actually have a hard time with that question too. Interior designers I don’t
work with. Landscape is definitely a frequent subject area.
Riess: Landscape is not an expertise within the firm, is it?
Kriken: Actually, we might define where the park would be, but we don’t design the
park. We might represent the park as a design in the early phases, before a
landscape architect really gets involved in it, then it becomes their project.
Riess: It’s come up in other interviews I’ve done over the years, I guess mostly in
residential architecture, the issue of where the house ends and the landscape
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architecture begins. But it seems to be even more important for urban design,
actually, to have a really good strong sense of landscape and terrain and so on,
I would think…
Kriken: Well, in a broad-brush way, we have been able to seize opportunities, or see
opportunities, I should say, and get the audience to agree, whether it’s the
public audience or the private developer. We even use feng shui methods to
define open space to disperse negative energy [chuckling].
Riess: Tell me more! Is this here, or in China?
Kriken: No, it’s over there mainly. In an amateur way. My partner, Carolina Woo, was
somebody who could talk about that and guided what direction I should face
at my desk (never facing west). Anyway, we decide the location and amount of
open space and water on a piece of property. We didn’t design the water
feature ultimately. But when the landscape architect was given the problem, he
had the location, water and trees, and whatever else that came from the early
plans. We do design open space in a conceptual way and we make drawings
how it will look. I don’t mean detail. I mean we make general imagery of it to
give a feeling of what that would be like to walk through.
Riess: It’s an interesting question, how you use landscape architects and what their
role is.
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Kriken: Beyond the programmatic elements, I try to give them a free hand to make it
their creative thing, and not to dominate it. One last collaboration I should
mention is with the artists we use to illustrate the character of public space. In
our design work, they contribute to our detail analysis and guidelines for
public spaces. I am proud to say, most are members of the Sunday Afternoon
Watercolor Society that I founded in 1980.
Riess: Okay, now going on through these suggested topics: What do architects
discuss and fight about? I assume we could talk about that in talking about
partner meetings. But actually, I wonder whether when architects get together
they discuss architecture, or not.
Kriken: No, we do. SOM partners talk about architecture, and we talk about problems
in making strong identity for buildings. There used to be a process--I don’t
know that they’re still doing it--where we would actually take a little bit of our
meetings together and everybody would do a PowerPoint presentation of the
work they were working on, and it would be a chance to share our work. We
wouldn’t have a big discussion about it, but it could be part of cocktail party
conversation afterward. And I think it’s a great idea to continue that. I’m not
sure they’re continuing it with regularity. What do architects fight about? They
fight about the credit they’re given for something they do. It’s a very human
kind of reaction, not necessarily positive ones, but they fight about who gets to
make the decision on a particular subject, who has the last word. But usually in
the firm it’s pretty well established.
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Riess: So where is the credit seen? It’s not like the credits rolling on the movies. You
don’t get public credit in many ways, right? I mean, who would know? It’s
only when somebody comes along and writes a book, and then they try to
figure out who was the associate and who was the…
Kriken: Well, an example, we did the master plan for this area called Taipingqiao [in
Shanghai]. And in that we created the idea for historic preservation, a park and
a lake, a basic road structure, the land uses, and so forth, building heights, and
got it approved over much worry on the part of the people that were
approving it that the lake wasn’t going to work, and the historic preservation
wasn’t going to work. And it was built. We did not get selected to do the
architecture for the historic preservation area. An architect named Ben Wood
got that project, and he did a wonderful job. So, in the early days when it was
published, it might be published under my project and then Ben Wood would
say, “No, I did that.” But he meant the architecture for it, and I meant the
overall planning part. That could be very contentious, and we had to get the
client involved in defining the activities of each of their consultants. So that is a
kind of credit problem. But there are other things too.
Riess: You mean other things you fight about? Or other issues of credit?
Kriken: Well, maybe that’s enough for credit. Other things that people fight about?
Riess: I wasn’t even going to ask that. I thought it sounded dumb.
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Kriken: Okay, well, it is dumb. I don’t particularly want to talk about that except in
light of that earlier point I told you about architects, how we’re so competitive
with each other in the firm and then just generally, so that there’s a kind of
combativeness and a jealousy about other people’s success.
Riess: Well, that and gossip, insidious rumor and so on, we know about that.
Kriken: I wish it were otherwise, but it’s there.
Riess: Yes. I would love to know what magazines and journals and books you read. I
look around--what do I see? What do you read? What do you like to listen to--
you’ve got your Bose control there.
Kriken: I listen to quiet jazz music, and by quiet I mean smooth jazz, not honking
saxophones, although there’s a time for that too, I suppose. That’s what I’m
listening to now. I guess I listen to different music all the time, but I stream it
on my computer and I play it through this Bose.
Riess: Well, you’ve got wonderful systems here. Okay, so anyway, what do you read?
Kriken: I read The New Yorker every week; I read The New York Times every day. I read
our local paper. I read Watercolor magazine. I read the Places magazine that you
saw a copy of. I rarely read architectural magazines. I read Architectural Record
and used to read Progressive Architecture. I mostly read professional magazines
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when I get some notice in one of them or the other, and then I read it just for
my own press. [laughter]
Riess: Have you written up or published your work much?
Kriken: Over the years it has been a lot. Two or three pieces a year since the early '70s.
Riess: You don’t read fiction.
Kriken: Oh I do, actually; I don’t read it constantly, but I do. But, in these troubling
times, I’ve read every single one of the books about the Iraq war.
Riess: Joseph Esherick, I think you know, would have a big answer to that question
[chuckling].
Kriken: Oh my God. I told you earlier on that I was always seeing him with a book, and
his interest in talking about what he was reading to his students.
Riess: But whether or not you read Progressive Architecture--how important is it to
know, to be on speaking terms with what’s happening in your field?
Kriken: Yeah, I wonder about that too. [chuckling].
Riess: Looking around, this is the room where you keep your architecture books.
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Kriken: Yeah. Upstairs I have the other books.
Riess: Another way of asking that question is, what’s on your bedside table?
Kriken: Let me think. I just started--I was looking at this Joseph Brodsky Watermark. It’s
[Tape 10: Side A]
an unbelievable use of language, it’s a bit over the top.
Kriken: [conversation following up on the Joseph Brodsky book] I remember being in
Venice with my wife Katherine in January, actually just at the beginning of the
Gulf War, and it was foggy and it was just magical, because it was so quiet. As
we walked through the city, you could hear our footfalls echoing in these
courtyards and spaces and, except for the people that we were together with, it
was quiet. It was a very magical kind of experience of the city which is always
so crowded with people in the tourist season.
Riess: He described walking through fog as if you kind of cut a pattern through the
fog, and so it was easier to get home because you just went back through
your…
Kriken: The hole you made before. [chuckling] I remember we took a vaporetto back to
where you embark to the airport, and as we came through the fog we saw a
silhouette, and it was a soldier with one of these ski masks, a black hood with
eye holes standing in front of a machine gun, at the end of our corridor of
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walking. It was after the first Iraq war when everybody was just totally
nervous about what could happen.
Riess: Okay. So, today.
Kriken: Well, where are we anyway?
Riess: We keep moving towards the heart of the matter. [brief interruption in recording].
Kriken: I think if you succeed at Skidmore, you succeed because you are quicker than
someone else; I guess in some way that amounts to having very good
judgment. If you’ve been successful with quick decisions, it has to do with
judgment, and that is one of the qualities that’s rewarded at Skidmore. Do you
want to just start with that list of questions, like how a germ of an idea begins?
Riess: Yes. You have been involved in many different sorts of undertakings, but
basically cities in one fashion or another. Please pick one of them to follow
from the beginning. It would be helpful if we were actually thinking about a
particular project.
Kriken: Let me just think about it generally, first, if you don’t mind.
Riess: And in the oral history, quickness doesn’t get rewarded. [laughter]
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Kriken: All right. Well, I will not go too fast, then, but I would like, maybe, just to
conceptualize generally, because I think I start everything in a very similar
way. When a problem is presented, or even going after a problem that I would
like to do, obviously, the first thing is to find out everything you can about the
problem and its site and the context. You know, what people are hoping to
achieve, whether it’s an individual or a community.
Riess: You interview people, or you send somebody out to get information for you?
Kriken: I have to meet with city officials often to get material from them, because they
are the holders of, generally, the future plans and existing plans of any given
place. And then there is the client, which could be public or private, and I have
to understand what their objectives are. And then it’s my own experience and
insight [that I bring] to the problem and setting. Generally, oh, another thing I
do--I don’t think you can ever gather enough information to sort of make a
start, so what I have learned over the years is to begin sketching opportunities
and explorations, understanding completely that they may not be the right
thing. But it’s just to begin to understand the limitations and the opportunities
of the area or the subject that’s being studied. It helps focus future research.
Riess: How much do you have to know to begin to get into your creative phase?
Kriken: Well, I have to know a little bit about everything I’ve said, the context, the
client’s objectives, the site itself, and I have to know a little bit about all that.
Why I like to do this kind of broad-brush exploration of the opportunities and
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problems is that it begins to narrow what has to be developed in more detail,
what has to be explored in more detail, because you can’t get detail over the
widest possible array of choices. You have to start, in some way, to narrow the
choices so you can keep refining and developing more and more information
about what has to be done. Is that clear what I’m saying?
Riess: It’s first you have to have the big picture before--you can’t create the big
picture out of a bunch of little things. Is that partly what you’re saying? No.
Kriken: Not quite. I’m saying that I like to do--even though they could be wrong, I like
to just do explorations of what I think are the choices of direction for the
project. It is a way to engage the people who are involved early on, so long as
they’re not threatened by this activity. All I can say is to begin to narrow--if I
sketch twenty ways of doing something, and I can reduce that to ten ways by
just hearing how people respond, and what’s wrong with that, and so forth,
then I’ve made it a much more feasible and focused further research for the
project.
Riess: You get things on paper as soon as you can?
Kriken: Very early. Very early. I don’t do it before I have some kind of generalized
information about the aspects or the parts that I’ve described to you, but very
early I do it.
Riess: Is it still just part of the pitch? Or is this after you know you’ve got the job?
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Kriken: No, this is after you have a job. And there’s another thing I do, which is maybe
going to be even harder to explain, is that I ask myself--is this a generic
problem? Can you state this very particular problem in any generic terms that
cities more broadly share? And so, for example, in this project in Shanghai
called Taipingqiao, I noted very quickly that, in talks with university
professors and our client, that all of the new, expensive, high-density
development was happening along street corridors, like in America; it was
strip development, one building deep off of a roadway. The university
professors said that people are attracted to invest along what are famous
streets, because everybody in the city knows these famous streets. Even though
they may be building number 5010, it’s still on the famous street. And so, with
that in mind, I started thinking that well, the problem here then is a new idea
for Shanghai, which would be how do you create neighborhoods that have a
similar kind of identity that would make them known, and create the same
kind of real estate value in a district sense versus this linear sense? And that
got me started, and I was off and running with that, and what resulted was a
memorable neighborhood center defined by a lake, park, and historic building
with [a] retail entertainment district called Xin Tian Di, which has become so
famous in Shanghai, this whole complex.
Riess: Really! And you’ll tell me how to spell that eventually.
Kriken: Yeah, I will, I’ll tell you. Anyway, those elements then created value for all the
buildings around them, but it was a district: it was a larger land area than the
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linear single street. It didn’t really front any famous street, and so that was the
challenge [chuckling].
Riess: Did you, in the same spirit, give it a name? That was probably part of the
marketing effort.
Kriken: Well, probably the fame of this new neighborhood now is the Xin Tian Di
social heart that attracts people who live there, but also people from all over
the city to come and visit, and some degree of tourism as well.
Riess: Was that a hard sell once you got that idea?
Kriken: Yes, every part of it was a hard sell, except for my client. There had been no
long-term, successful experience in China of restoring the old buildings,
because these were buildings that had no plumbing, no electricity. They were
just kind of shells, and all of that had to be brought into them, plus structural
issues. So it hadn’t really worked before and there was no encouragement,
except to the degree there was one really important historic building on the
site. The first meeting space of the Communist Party in China was within this
group of buildings, so we knew we had to save one building. And then they
wanted a couple of buildings around the edges of it to create a context for it, so
it wouldn’t look lonely in its context. So from that, we extended it to make a
kind of a two-and-one-half block district of these older buildings. But the key
was adaptive reuse. I think most of them thought of preservation or
conservation as an idea that had to be put back as the same use. To rebuild
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Riess: Ah, I see.
these buildings, which are very ornate and lovely to see, and put them back as
housing, did not create the value necessary for the original investment. That
was the reason it had failed in earlier preservation attempts. But here we were
putting in uses that were economically stronger.
Kriken: And one of the rewards of this effort has been that now virtually every city in
China that has any of its historic city left in it is looking to find ways to keep
[it], to use it in a similar way, to use its uniqueness to create value for its
surroundings. So it has created a preservation movement in China.
Riess: I’m surprised that the people of the Great Wall and the tomb soldiers aren’t
preservationists. A building, perhaps, doesn’t necessarily have the same…
Kriken: Well, in this instance--this is in Shanghai, so it was the French Concession area.
So while there was a wonderful adapting of the architecture to Chinese culture,
they weren’t historic Chinese things like the tombs and the Great Wall.
Riess: I’ve seen pictures of this area. I realize that I have friends who were in
Shanghai for a couple of months, and I have received lots of pictures, and it’s
so admired.
Kriken: Um-hmm. Then there was the lake itself and the park. The government, the
district government in particular, was very worried about making a lake. They
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hadn’t made a lake in Shanghai in the memory of anybody who was working
with us at that point. So they worried about the water being stagnant, and how
does it clean itself, and people falling in. The whole idea of a park without a
fence around it also worried them. They thought people would come out of
their homes in their pajamas and walk around, like they do in China. On
making a lake, we had done this before, particularly in America. So we brought
some experts in to talk about all the techniques you use to keep water quality
and also to protect people who might fall into the lake from hurting
themselves, and finally were given permission to do it. And now I’m told that
there are seven more lakes planned for Shanghai because of this success. The
landscape architect was Peter Walker from Berkeley. The ripple effect of these
projects across China is as exciting as the projects themselves.
Riess: Absolutely. When you’re confronted with the question about what will keep
people from falling in the lake and how do you keep the lake clean, it must be
hard not to overreact. Your cultural know-how in dealing with people of
another culture--have you improved greatly over the years so you don’t
stumble into…
Kriken: I had the edge of the first meeting hall of the Communist Party to kind of
stimulate a recognition that we had to save some buildings, and that it wasn’t
really a huge push with the government to go to a larger area. But with my
client, who had to figure out a way to do it, to actually do this project, it was a
very serious commitment because how to approach this was unknown. We
didn’t know whether we could restore it in part, or had to totally rebuild it.
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And while we were not the architects for the rebuilding of this area, the firms
who did take it on discovered it was largely a rebuild, a very careful
disassembly and rebuilding of almost everything.
Riess: And was that a Chinese firm?
Kriken: No, that was a mix of firms led by an American firm who opened an office
Shanghai to do it.
Riess: What was it?
Kriken: It was Wood Zapata from Chicago, and they set up an office there to do this
work, which you would absolutely have to have, because of the inability to
foresee what would happen when you take down a wall and so forth.
Riess: And were you the person who addressed their questions? Or did you go with a
team from Skidmore? Was there a Chinese-speaking person?
Kriken: The client for this group was Hong Kong, so that they spoke English very well.
Of course I had my SOM support group, and Carolina Woo was the managing
partner and she grew up in Shanghai, and Ellen Lou is an associate partner,
Chinese, and grew up in Singapore. But we had a lot of Chinese expertise,
including people in our office who had worked in the planning institutes of
China and who had moved to the U.S. and helped us interpret the rules and
the translations.
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Riess: That’s what I wondered.
Kriken: So it was not easy. It really takes an organization with lots of support to work
in a completely different language culture like China.
Riess: That’s a good example, and highly complex. And then there’s Vietnam and
there’s Brazil. It’s much the same each time?
Kriken: I think what I outlined before as a method of starting by making sketches
quickly or models--in fact, on the Taipingqiao we made clay models. The
Chinese had never seen clay models before, and just getting them over there
without falling apart was a major logistical problem. But we did, and we had
them all up; it was like kid’s stuff for them. They couldn’t believe you’d come
in with soft clay models.
Riess: So they were all solid forms?
Kriken: Yeah, solid forms, and they’re so used to seeing very detailed architectural
studies. In China models are much more architectural than the simpler city
planning kind of models we make in the U.S. So we made five or six different
approaches to this problem, and little by little this idea that I described to you
emerged from that process. When we do these six or seven ideas, it isn’t that
we don’t have strong feelings about one or two of them versus others. And as I
think I’ve told you in past discussions, often we can use some of them to
explain why we prefer another, so that they become teaching tools, sometimes
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leading to a conclusion. But on the other hand, we might uncover something
that then causes us to have to abandon the things that we were thinking had
the most promise in the beginning.
Riess: So a kind of model for what’s going on is teaching.
Kriken: Yeah, it really is, it really is teaching. And then drawing out from the
governmental agencies, whether it’s Brazil or China or Vietnam, more and
more information. Because for whatever reasons, when we think we know
everything about the site, we’ll hear that there’s a six-foot diameter sewer line
running right through the property that we thought was unencumbered, and
we have to leave a big easement, a swath cutting through there. I really don’t
like those kinds of situations, because if built with the swath it would not make
any sense when you’re on the ground.
Riess: A running track!
Kriken: It has to have some visible understanding to it, and so you really want to know
all about the site before you consider your final approach.
Riess: But most people are just walking around, not paying attention to anything,
aren’t they? But yet you’re creating an environment in which there is a
rationale for every pavement width. Who does it make a difference to?
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Kriken: Yeah, well, just say there’s a project of five blocks by five blocks, and you
suddenly find out there’s a diagonal line you can’t build on that cuts through
it, and it’s a totally disconnected geometry or orientation than anything else
you’ve been working with. How do you use it? It’s an open area that could be
in courtyards of buildings, but you’d have to leave the ends open to allow this
pipe to come through, or it could be a park. But why would you just do a
strange diagonal line? Well, in fact, what we had to do in another instance in
Shanghai--you either have to partly take it on as a roadway or a linear park or a
setback, a road and then a setback from the road to the first building. And it all
has to be visually coherent and functionally coherent. It can’t just be, Oh well,
we didn’t build anything on there, that’s just what’s left over. It has to have
some meaning in the plan. So those are things that can be challenging, for sure.
Or it can be an old rail line that they just don’t want to give up for x number of
years but eventually it’ll go away, and so you have to think about what’s the
early time frame significance of that cut through the site, and then how can you
heal over that when it’s finally gone.
Riess: I’m curious, if you had known about the sewer line, or something like that, it
could have been an organizing principle, maybe, of the whole project.
Kriken: Well, in the particular project I’m thinking of, which is called the Knowledge
and Innovation City, we had a very strong idea about a linear organization that
had to do with a village main street connecting a university to a campus social
heart that was part of this geometry. There was a transit station that generated
the people flow along this street corridor. Because of all these things, we felt
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[Tape 10: Side B]
strongly about the importance of the street geometry, so we had to just make
the sewer fit in, kind of go away and not become a prominent part. Besides, it
would be like making a memorial to a storm sewer, which is not the same thing
as the social heart to the community. [laughter]
Riess: How can you name a city Knowledge and Innovation City?
Kriken: Well, it’s the Chinese language. That’s just a translation from Chinese.
Riess: I want to begin to talk about LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental
Design] certification, and environmental issues in general. But first, how much
interest in different septic systems or solutions to what are always problems
about water were you able to employ in China? Especially trying to think back
fifteen years ago?
Kriken: In Vietnam, we were trying to get our client to not use the American approach
to sewage treatment, which is, as you might expect, the most costly, but an
approach that uses aeration. Actually St. Helena, California, has such a system.
They use aeration and biofiltration to take the toxicity out of the water supply.
We tried to do that, and the client insisted on using an approach they use in
Taiwan, which is a septic tank system. I researched this a little bit and found
out that the entire city of Tokyo uses a septic tank system. They have these
trucks that drive around, beautiful stainless steel, shiny, clean-looking trucks
that evacuate these septic tanks with some frequency, and then they take them
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away to some place where it is properly treated. The Chinese thought the
American high-technology solutions were absurd because they were so front-
end, expensive, and had nothing to do with how things were being done in
their country. A lot of the Chinese would say that we’re just engineering heavy.
We do everything the hard way.
Riess: Referring to how you’re…
Kriken: The problem-solving background we come from. It’s always like money can fix
it. [chuckling] And that’s not the way they approach the same problem. They try
to find other more efficient ways to do the same thing. In Vietnam they are
now putting in centralized treatment facilities that will capture the sanitary
water and treat it, so it’s been an evolution for the government as well as for
our client group, to come to a point where they can afford it and where it
seems like the way to go forward in the future.
Riess: And is there any reward for such forward thinking?
Kriken: Things are changing very fast. This is 2008 and I would think around the end of
2006, 2007 we started getting directives from our Chinese government and
Chinese clients that we should do LEED standards for our projects, and then
now there’s a Chinese code that’s taken the place of LEED, but it’s the same
general idea. And so these ideas are now part of virtually every project we do--
I would say all projects, period.
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Riess: And so are you optimistic about cities supporting the number of people that
they have to?
Kriken: Boy, that’s a good question, because I don’t know. I think in America we’re
living in a kind of ideal. From an American perspective, the energy sources
we’ve had to use, the food, and the density are all so special and so unique
when compared to the rest of the world. I’m certain we can’t sustain the kind of
life that we presently enjoy. For that matter, we can’t sustain our lifestyle
worldwide. It’s just--the sheer impact of more people that is going to force
changes. There might be some really good things that are discovered by people
living more densely, but it is not going to be the same. Some of the things that I
value today will not be sustainable in the future.
Riess: Have you ever done a project in India?
Kriken: We’re just starting now to do projects there, and while there’s a lot of positive
feelings about the life of the Indian people to improve eventually, they’re still
bucking problems that will hurt city livability. I’m saying this just from our
first experiences over there. They do not have the governmental responsibility
or authority to plan large-scale areas or large geographic areas. Their cities are
being made up of many gated communities one next to the other. Nothing
connects except to big, enormous highways. All accessibility is handled by
these widespread, very large roadways that prevent any kind of pedestrian life.
You don’t get any of the redundancy or the multiple benefits of secondary
streets that move through the new projects. They’re all like cul-de-sacs. It is
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why we hear stories that in India every commute is two hours. The simplest
kinds of transactions and access needs are two hours. So while I’m sure the
lives of many people are improving, that’s one area that needs to change.
Riess: The change would have to come from the top.
Kriken: In this instance, I think so. I’ve been told that--I don’t have the experience to
know if this is true--but they have such a high regard for the village life, the
agricultural units that still exist in India, that they feel that they should leave
those areas alone, so that these cities are growing and these historic and low-
technology environments… So that’s also interfering with the connectivity. In
China I also get arguments about the need for gated communities. They’re
needed to isolate the more affluent growing population from the poorer people
to avoid any possible social friction.
Riess: You were saying they do that.
Kriken: They do do that, and everybody’s really happy to see it, even. But my client,
who was worried about that in the first place, now thinks of it as part of city
life, but there is concern about gentrification conflicting with the old ways and
how that is finally addressed in all the emerging countries: Vietnam, India, and
China.
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Riess: That’s really interesting, respecting the village with the one buffalo and the
dung patties and the colorful people, because you certainly want them. Where
is the project in India? Are you working on it?
Kriken: I have to say that while I’ve been to India and I have a lot of Indian architect
friends, I have not been directly involved in these new projects in India; they’re
very recent. I’m making these observations from looking at the work in the
office. And the way I look at it, it’s a time for SOM to see what these problems
are and then to begin to think about how to reformat a problem like this so that
we can make more people aware, educate people to the long-term disaster that
is out there from a city that is not well connected. They call them centers of
excellence. They could have all the LEED certificates in the world, but they
don’t add up to good cities.
Riess: It seems strange that SOM, that America in fact, is designing other parts of the
world. Why is it? Is it technology? Why does the very sufficient China need us?
Kriken: Well, I think there’s probably two reasons, at least two reasons. One is that they
view American experience as having knowledge about cars and other modern
impacts on their older cities. And then the other experience is where they
believe that the American vision is an image of success, economic and cultural
and whatever other--I won’t say social, but success--and they want to emulate
it. They want to be embarked on modernity. It’s the future, it’s now, and I think
it’s sad! We have tried to show aspects of their history, their culture, climate,
and geography that are valuable and should be protected. The Jin Mao Tower
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in Shanghai is an example of trying to take some of the strategies that were
used in these pagoda temple towers, and to just create, in very subtle ways, a
silhouette memory of it. You can be in the Yuyuan Gardens in Shanghai and
look across to the Pudong and you see this, which was until recently the tallest
building in China, and it doesn’t look alien. It doesn’t look like it came from
outer space. It looks like it’s part of this place in a very special way.
Riess: And they had to be sold on that idea.
Kriken: I think probably it had to be, like everything; it had to be well understood, so
that people were comfortable with it. This was done by our Chicago office.
Riess: Perhaps America is a guiding force in these areas, but it may change?
Kriken: Many years ago, when we were working in Iran and I was just new with SOM,
we worked with a firm in Iran called Mandala that was very interested in
historical--Iran being one of the few countries in the Middle East that has an
urban culture going way back in time. But most of the architects practicing in
Iran had this urge to be modern with all glass buildings, and never mind that
it’s a desert; we can solve climate problems with electricity. Together with this
Iranian architect--his name is Nader Ardalan and Marc [Goldstein] we worked
on many projects. We tried to find contemporary expressions of these historic
architectural responses to climate and culture. We made diagrams and designs,
and they were presented to the Shah and to other architects to get them
interested in how the new history and the new building of the country could
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eflect these beautiful expressions from history. They would not look historic,
but they would be about modern Iran, not international modern.
Riess: Maybe one way to talk about this it to ask what you tell your students, how
you talk about rules for the game that are going to work all over the world,
presuming America is going to continue to be designing the world.
Kriken: [chuckling] I don’t think that’s true, at all, by the way. We are training students,
but in my classes at least a third are from Asia.
Riess: Oh that’s interesting!
Kriken: Soon whatever knowledge that we bring overseas will one day be locally
available by these new Chinese practitioners who have been exposed to much
of what we offer from America.
Riess: That’s very interesting. Yes, that’s right.
Kriken: Um-hmm.
Riess: So that doesn’t mean that you start a Skidmore office in Shanghai.
Kriken: Well, we may, but it may be all Chinese people who are running it. That’s what
it may mean. And our office in San Francisco, I don’t know if literally it’s 50
percent Asian, but it’s getting right up there. And that I find interesting as well.
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Riess: Yeah. Okay.
Kriken: I’m not sure I answered your question about do we bring a set of technology
skills. I would like to think, in an ideal way, at least in my practice at SOM, that
we have this two-edged thing where we try to bring them a knowledge and
respect for their own historic traditions, and we also try to bring people a
recognition, where it’s absent anyway, of their own climate, culture, the
uniquenesses of their particular place, whether it’s on the water or in the
mountains. And then we bring what we believe is a shared understanding of
modern cities, which has to do with accessibility and things that we’ve talked
about before: how people can live in dense, compact and livable cities; how
identity of place is very important.
Riess: But when you pointed that out before, you also said they were happy.
Kriken: Yes. I have no idea if they’re happy, but I just remember there was one student
from Taipei who said, “John, my neighborhood has none of the qualities you’re
aspiring to, but I still like it.” And I’m sure it was a Taipei residential
neighborhood that is very dense and very repetitive--all those things.
Riess: People don’t see the uniqueness of where they are living until they’re on the
point of destroying it. And so as a firm, so you come along and you see it.
Kriken: Yeah. To me it’s not so surprising, because at this point in my career I can see
history being forgotten in my own city of San Francisco and other places in
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America. Probably 70 percent of San Francisco’s population has come here or
been born after memorable or historic places were made. Had they known it
from earlier times, they might want to protect it or they might want to make it
more special; they might want to tear it down, but it doesn’t have the same
meaning or importance to them. So our cities change. I would prefer we don’t
drop Allan Jacob’s Urban Design Plan for the city of San Francisco but carefully
update it to meet these new circumstances.
Riess: Now I was asking you to pick a couple of other projects to talk about your
approach--does it work when you’re doing campus planning?
Kriken: Let’s do talk about maybe UC Merced as an example of process.
[Tape 11: Side A]
Kriken: They had a big piece of land in Merced, and they had picked where they
wanted the university located, which was in the middle of nowhere, as
removed as possible from the city. I pretended that it was a good site in the
interview, or I didn’t maybe say anything plus or minus about the site because
you never know how invested people are in particular ideas until you get the
job. So I was probably mute on the subject of this particular site location, but it
kept bugging me because it was really like designing in Saudi Arabia or Iran,
where there were no physical features that you could build ideas off of or
capture some identity opportunity that was built into the site. And maybe that
is, as a general rule, also one of the first things I look at is what is there in
topography, landscape, view, and other features, that can be protected and be
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part of the identity of the place that you’re designing. I don’t think all
designers do that. I think they look at everything as a clean slate [chuckling]
treeless with flat ground. So anyway, finally, after we had done the initial
studies and listened to people’s ambitions and goals for the project, I said,
“You know, this is not a good site. We should move the project down closer to
the city.” Just on environmental grounds, we should move it next to this lake
where we can use the trees and the water as a way of cooling the air, the
natural air that would form the outside environment of the campus. Also I
said, “If we put it on the top of this hill, everything, everything has to be built
nearby and everyone will have to travel several miles farther.” I meant faculty
housing and student housing. “All of that, either by its own building footprint
or by its runoff, will pollute or degrade the land around it and certainly create
problems for the continuation of the vernal pool life and the fairy shrimp.” I
used all of those arguments to explain why the campus should be moved closer
to the city, where they had already degraded the land by building a golf
course. And so I said, “Let’s just start right on the golf course, so we don’t have
any conflicts with vernal pools,” which also happened to be near the lake.
There was some topography that I took advantage of, but the main problem
was to develop a geometry for the campus that was good for pedestrians and
bicycles and could channel the breezes that would come across the lake into the
campus site area. At one point, I probably made two hundred plans, 8-1/2 by
11, just drawing different ways the geometry could fit into this landscape, and I
pinned them all up. In hotel rooms I had them around all the mirrors and
doors. The goal was to find one alternative that looked so natural and
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somehow so unconscious in achieving this purpose, that it wouldn’t look like it
was designed at all. I can be very obsessive in searching for an answer.
Riess: You already knew the program, you knew how much land, how many
buildings, how big the campus was going to be?
Kriken: You know, what we did for that was we researched all of the nine existing
campuses of UC for their land requirements. We also talked to a lot of facilities
managers about where they found difficulties in their previous plans. Of
course, I’d done a lot of planning for UC’s existing campuses before this.
Riess: But when you were doing your drawings, you were doing the fully planned
out, fully realized campus?
Kriken: Yeah, I would have tracing paper pads, and I would just keep tracing different
geometries and ways to make it different until I felt I had one that was very
unselfconscious and just seemed very natural in its setting. A lot of things that I
think are the best look like they’ve had no intelligence brought to them; they
just seem like, “Well, what else would it be?” [chuckling] “How could it be
anything else?” And there was nothing special about that because it looks so
obvious. That’s what I would strive for in all these projects.
Riess: You would say that would be a universal for you?
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Kriken: Well, yes. In that instance it was a green field, so we were putting something
on the land. That’s a lot different than putting something in a city, where
there’s a different kind of context to respect. But generally speaking, there’s
something about a place that you fit into, and then there’s maybe something
else about a place that you use to create unique identity, either in parts, or for
the whole, or in some dimension to the project.
Riess: In the case of Merced, how did you work on the unique identity part?
Kriken: Well, I wanted to draw the identity from its relationship to this lake and the
County Park.
Riess: Is that Lake Yosemite?
Kriken: Yeah. And then on the opposite side would be playfields for the university,
which is in a valley or a meadow, so that roads come across, connecting on one
side the park and the other side the playfields. The students, hopefully, would
be very mindful of the campus edges from being inside it. Of course, you
would get some sense of these edges from outside the campus. The playfields
created a foreground, and that was in a meadow, and so the university’s
elevated on a slight bluff. On the other hand, I didn’t want to create a moat
feeling, making the university apart from community life, regular life. So it’s a
delicate kind of balance to achieve, but you also figure that future generations
will really finally have to address how these pieces come together.
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Riess: When you start out with these drawings you’re seeing it as a two-dimensional
concept?
Kriken: Um-hmm. Um-hmm.
Riess: Is it another set of drawings where you have to think about what’s the highest
building?
Kriken: Actually, there it was pretty easy, because--there will be exceptions, but we
decided that because we wanted this very high LEED standards that we’d try
to minimize elevator needs. So we’ve said basically it’s a three- to four-story
campus, and we’ll put the faculty offices on the top floor and then have all the
student stuff down below. So the elevators--there would still be handicapped
service and low usage for the people going up to the faculty offices, and we
hoped that most of the students then could get around just with stairs and the
classrooms on the lower floors.
Riess: Oh, and was that mandated in the LEED standards?
Kriken: I think I could say that was an interpretation. I don’t think there’s anything
directly in LEED that says that. It’s just that we know that elevator use is an
energy factor.
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Riess: I don’t understand how LEED works. For anything since 1998, when it was
established, is it incumbent upon you that you bear it in mind? Or does your
client have to say, “This is what I want.”
Kriken: Yeah. The client sets the goal. And a lot of times, like the state of California will
say that they want LEED silver, platinum, or something, as their goal for a
project.
Riess: How about burrowing? I think of the campus library [Bancroft] at Berkeley,
which goes down several stories--is that something that is always good?
Kriken: Well, you always have to think about daylighting. That saves electricity for
lights. So that it is probably balancing the insulation from the sun’s heat, to
daylight, to the height in elevators to all these different things. These are
wonderful puzzles. They just are so much fun to try to optimize as much of it
as you possibly can at the same time, and not limit the number of trade-offs.
But there are always trade-offs, too. There’s always something that cannot get
quite the value of the other things, in terms of LEED, or in terms of other
design objectives. There’s always something.
Riess: Those things that are trade-offs, is that a place where smart computer people in
the office can answer the question for you? Is there a lot of data crunching in
decision-making?
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Kriken: They’re doing that now. We didn’t do BTUs per hour or anything like that
specifically when we were doing the overall planning. They tend to do it more
around specific buildings. But we did talk about vehicular trips per day and
things of that kind and trying to limit the need for the trips and the distance of
the trips that would be taken, things like that. It’s a little more gross on the city
planning side. For buildings we can calculate exactly how much heat or cold
can enter the interior space of a building, and what does it take to make the
interior temperature comfortable. As part of the plan we did create a central
plant that is like an exhibition of how the campus produces its cooling and
heating.
Riess: So you can look into the works?
Kriken: You can see the workings, and maybe there will be some days you can see how
well it’s performing, but it’s one of those things where you’re producing cold
water in the evening and then using it during the day. And also, all of the
equipment is sized so that you couldn’t, even if you wanted to, reduce the
ambient indoor temperature to sixty degrees, as it would require too much
energy. I can’t remember now whether we fixed the interior temperature so
that it just fluctuated with the outdoor temperature but was in a comfort zone,
or we just had a flat cap on it so that it couldn’t go lower than a certain amount
or higher than a certain amount.
Riess: This is way beyond urban design, though, right?
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Kriken: Well, a little bit what I’m talking about is in the architectural part of solving the
problem of the individual buildings. We had to broadly think about it, but we
didn’t make the calculations.
Riess: Thinking about urban design, when you answer questions I have to keep
reminding myself that you go away and somebody else comes along and does
buildings. And in fact, they might do them really differently. You don’t have
very much control. How much control do you have?
Kriken: Well, it varies. In the case of Vietnam, I go back and with a client I critique the
work of the architects. We discuss what seems to work and what does not.
Sometimes I have a direct critical role in the process, on almost a building by
building basis. I may not be the only one reviewing the buildings, but I might
be one of several reviewers.
Riess: And then are you called a consultant and paid as a consultant? Or what?
Kriken: I could be a consultant. I could be SOM. I could be SOM as a consultant. I could
be part of a design review board, which I have done at UC San Diego and UC
Berkeley and UC San Francisco. So there are different ways that I could
perform that or others can perform it, but generally they’re all working within
some kind of master plan context, and then they’re trying to fit the buildings in
on that basis. One of the things that was so wonderful at UC Merced was that
my colleagues at SOM were doing the library, which was one of the first
buildings, and then the other two buildings were being done simultaneously,
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so that we could meet as a group and talk about things that would be in
common and things that would be different about each of the buildings. And
actually, the first grouping of buildings is just simply beautiful, around this
quad that looks out onto the valley, and it may be better than all the initial
building groupings, except perhaps UCLA. So I’m hoping that this grouping of
buildings will have meaning and importance over the life of the university, or
at least for the next hundred years.
Riess: I have to go down there. I used to go down to Merced and tape and get
involved in the conversations that Carol Tomlinson-Keasey and Roger
Samuelsen, all these people were sitting around and having--it was just such an
incredible struggle. They were partly trying to honor the history of how the
campus had been given to them, and then suddenly the vernal pools and the
fairy shrimp, and I thought it was really all over.
Kriken: I kept thinking--they bought the development rights for forty thousand acres or
Riess: Protective.
something, some huge number, in order to get permission to build on the
smallish area of vernal pool, fairy shrimp, in this area, together with the
already partially degraded area of the County Park and the golf course. You
would think Fish & Game would see the logic in that, or somehow see a
positiveness in that. But it always irritated me that Fish & Game and the Corps
of Engineers, all of these people who have done the most harm to the
environment, suddenly become so irrationally…
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Kriken: …protective. It’s almost like they’re just aching for a fight and they don’t care
what the stakes are.
Riess: When you talk about beautiful university campuses, I think of Santa Cruz,
which is closely associated with Thomas Church--the landscape architect in
that case being part of their planning legend. Where does landscape
architecture fit into what you did at Merced?
Kriken: Well, there is some overlap, but for me--I might make a drawing of a lake and
park, knowing that that will become a specific job for a landscape architect who
will carefully design both of those things. For me it’s just a diagram, kind of a
place holder, until that becomes an actual designed element. And the same in
buildings: I lay out buildings and they represent certain principles, but they
don’t have all the principles that come from the internal workings of the
building. So for both architecture and landscape, there is always new input that
makes it even better than my first contemplation of the opportunity.
Riess: Thomas Church; in residential architecture his clients say that they would call
him first and he would site the building. You don’t feel that a landscape
architect is better able to site a city or site a campus than an urban designer?
I’m sure the answer is no, but I’m interested.
Kriken: No, I guess I don’t think it can be done better. I’ve worked on the Santa Cruz
campus, and it’s a beautiful place, but there are about three major problems
with Santa Cruz that I tried to deal with; I learned from all of these UC
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campuses. The approach to Santa Cruz is terrible. You’ve got a strip
development, and then you go through a residential neighborhood and you
don’t have any lead-up to the fact that you’re coming to one of the ten major
campuses of the University of California, one of the most prestigious public
systems in the whole world. You don’t really get it until you get up to the
university. It seems to me there was a moment when you could have thought
about your project all the way back to where it meets the public realm. Another
issue with Santa Cruz that we were concerned about is that they were using an
individual college structure, so that the academic core was quite spread out;
each college had living units and academic parts. Except for the library, there’s
only a very few central facilities. Underneath all those trees there are these
deep canyons, which you cannot cross, so you have to walk out of direction a
considerable distance to make these connections between classes. The study we
did made suggestions about where they definitely need pedestrian bridges to
make it academically connected. The third was that there was no real social
heart or center to the campus. The students have slowly but surely
acknowledged that it would be great to have one place on campus, like a
downtown, where everybody could meet and have the sense of being in a
central place, instead of these little places hidden in the woods. And so now
they’re working on making a social heart. Well, the key to Merced was this idea
of a main street that went through, actually right inside the academic area.
Phase I actually is the beginning of Main Street, and eventually Main Street will
have academic services and coffeehouses being an integral part of the design
and not something that comes, whatever it is, forty years after Santa Cruz was
created. From a landscape point of view it was beautiful topography, and one
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could imagine putting this campus into the trees. But these other aspects would
also be on my mind, how you connect the pieces together, how you connect it
to the surrounding community.
Riess: I’m curious about how you establish fees for projects which seem utterly open
ended. Do you get enough money in the beginning? Do have to go back and
ask for more? What’s the money end of any of them?
Kriken: Always the uncertainty in making a fee is the degree to which we have to keep
doing things over to meet community needs or perceived problems that the
plan is not achieving. So generally in our fee we say there are so many
meetings of that kind that could upset or redesign the project and we’d have to
start over. So we budget for that, and then we budget for the time it takes to do
the work in between those meetings. If they double the number of meetings
and we have to keep spinning, then that’s a unit cost that can be plugged in as
required. So that’s pretty much the way it goes.
Riess: You never lose money on a project.
Kriken: Well, [chuckling], no, I think if the contract’s well written, there’s less chance of
[Tape 11: Side B]
losing money, but there are certainly very big chances to lose money in any of
these projects, including the architectural side.
Riess: The design side is the romance part, separate from the money matters?
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Kriken: Well, you know, again, as I’ve mentioned before, the separation of the
management of the office, which is contract writing and project management,
from the design could even be seen as a flaw in some ways, but it allows the
romance to be continued. The designer will always be wanting more time, and
the manager will always be arguing, “You’ve got to come to a decision, now.”
It’s sort of like the Fellini movie “8 1/2”--everybody was saying, “You’ve got to
make a decision, Antonio.” And he kept saying “Well, there’s this and there’s
that.” Everybody’s pressing and pressing for decisions--I love that movie, by
the way--and in the end, remember, there’s this crazy structure, sort of like a
crazy plaything that goes up very high and it’s got things hanging from it and
everything, just a crazy thing! And that wonderful little band of clowns, and all
the actors all hold hands and they dance around it, and it’s over. [laughter]
Riess: That’s a great image. Tell me about when projects come to you, the Shanghai
project or the Valencia Town Center or Saigon South, whatever, it’s because
you’re known and someone picks up the phone?
Kriken: It’s so serendipitous, so many different ways. It could be knowing me; it could
be SOM, just the name. It could be friends, friends of friends recommending. It
could be articles that were read. It could be talks given. There are so many
different ways. But thank God for that, I mean that there are different avenues.
There might be a bit of guidance: you might say some year that, Let’s try to get
new towns, or Let’s try to get something that is of particular interest or that’s a
timely subject. And then you might try to find out where that kind of stuff is
happening and go, actually, and introduce yourself to those people. Actually,
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there was a time when I said, “We’ve got to get into university planning,”
because it was one of those niched areas that only the same people did over
and over. And so we went out and met with people. I can’t quite remember
where we started. But I remember there was a chancellor at UC Davis, one of
our earlier campus projects; it was the medical campus. We interviewed for it
and we actually did some little thumbnails, because we thought, We’re coming
from behind because we don’t have a body of work to show of all the
campuses we’ve done. So we looked at the site and we made some little
sketches, just to have something to talk about. The chancellor was there and he
said, “Okay, come back again in two weeks and show me what you would do
if you had a clean slate here.” And so we went back and--of course, you get
really quickly over your head because you know so little about the subject. But
anyway, we did that and we had a lively conversation. We met with him alone,
and through that kind of test we became credible and were given the work.
Riess: So that was a test.
Kriken: I think those are all tests. The interview is a test. If you do some sketch design
ideas that you think might be appropriate, it’s a gamble, but it’s a test, too. And
the same is true with the private sector people. They have their own ways of
deciding; it might be a decision based just on your personality. They decide,
I’ve got to work with this guy for the next year. Is he going to be a pain in the
ass? Or is it going to be fun? They probably have very little knowledge of there
being talent differences or skill differences, sort of like going to a doctor. All
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doctors are presumed to be perfect, and there’s no difference between them,
but we know different.
Riess: So it’s a bedside manner issue.
Kriken: It can be that. All those things are operating.
Riess: Have you gotten better at that, do you think?
Kriken: I’m never comfortable in those things. I really am not. It’s always a sort of a
hand-wringing experience. I guess I am more relaxed about doing it now, or
I’m more comfortable with it. I think when you’re younger you just want to be
saying the right thing all the time, so you obsess on it more. And when you
have had more experience and are older, you are so convinced you’re right that
you don’t care if the person doesn’t agree with you. It doesn’t matter, because
you’re right. [laughter]
Riess: When you’re cooking up a campaign, and reaching out to get college campus
work for instance, is that a management meeting?
Kriken: Yeah, we would talk about it because we would be investing money in it. It
might not be a lot, or it could be a lot, depending. The architectural part of our
office make up the slick brochures, so you’re going to put--I’ll make up a
number, ten thousand dollars, into seeding or getting something started, that
you don’t have at the moment. It’s something we discuss. Although I can’t
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think of an example, somebody could say, “Well, that’s a dumb idea because
it’s an area that is fast declining,” or “The budget has been cut for all new
campus development. Let’s do it another time when the funding money comes
back.” So there could be some kind of intelligence that guides the campaign.
Riess: When you’re talking about a management meeting, it would be San Francisco.
Kriken: It would be San Francisco definitely, because promotion is paid for out of the
local office, although there are times when we have to coordinate nationally on
subject areas because some subjects are national in scope, and there’s always at
SOM, territorial issues have to be discussed.
Riess: At the management meetings there would be expert cost estimators? You don’t
have to think about the money, do you?
Kriken: No, well, I think about the time, which is money. But I don’t think specifically
about the money. I think about the time I’m taking to do something.
Riess: How do you put together your team? It sounds like you have a team. Has it
been intact over the years?
Kriken: There are always a few people--it changes all the time. But there is something
about the logistics of projects that have tended never to get more than about
four or five people on a particular project, and sometimes less. Years earlier,
this wonderful time in my early days at SOM, we would spend a whole year on
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a project! Now we have like five at the same time, and they’re very much
shorter, and it’s a very different kind of pacing. But I was doing those new
towns in [Saudi] Arabia and Iran, and they were long time frames. And
actually we might have eight people. We might have twice as many people
working on three times the calendar time that we have today. These were
wonderful times to glory in the ideas, or just to enjoy the process and
thoughtfulness and all the other stuff, the puzzle-solving part of it and the
graphics, the hand-drawn graphics that we would have to do in those days.
Today it’s much faster. That’s why I said [what I said] earlier about speed,
particularly today.
Riess: What you learn from one project, can you quickly turn it over and do it again?
Sort of watching out that you don’t do too much of that.
Kriken: Oh yeah, and actually the way I think about that is that there’s something in
my background, or some little piece of it or the whole thing--that I’ve done
something similar before, or I’ve had a similar idea before. I always say to
myself, Well, if we fail in some way to take this to the next step up, I can
always fall back on that. And falling back on that is not really a horrible thing,
it’s just it isn’t as interesting for me and the team personally if we have to
pursue an approach that has some similarity with something we’ve done
before. But it’s never duplicating, by any means. To give you an idea, when I
was doing quasi-suburban work I became, for a while, very interested in the
idea of the way roads can address property and how a lot of suburban
development had lost that capability because of vast surface parking lots
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separating uses, and so they lost a lot of their adaptability. This could be at
Hewlett-Packard, and you discovered that Hewlett-Packard could not sell off a
piece of its property because it was too identified with the larger HP campus,
where the shared parking lot knit the site together. But if you had first thought
of a street, and had buildings on a street, and then the parking was somehow
distributed and out of sight, each property would have a separate address, so
to speak. You would have more flexibility and adaptability in either growing
or reducing your square footage and have some capability of selling it or
leasing it or something different than just leaving it vacant. [Further discussion
in the next interview.] So that would be an idea; if I didn’t come up with
something else, I could always go back to that as an organizing principle. Or
maybe it would be that and something new combined with it.
Riess: You have built into your consciousness when you have to cut to the chase. Or
do you have somebody tapping you on the shoulder from the management?
Kriken: It could be. It could be that very idea, or the client doesn’t like it, or is nervous
about it, and we can’t make them comfortable with something new or
something different than what their expectation was, so that could be a reason
to fall back. Sometimes it’s we can’t find the answer, sometimes it’s not
acceptable to the client or to the city or to the setting. And so that’s when we
bring back the fallback or the standby idea.
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Riess: I was thinking the fallback would be invoked because you’ve used what you
think of as the number of hours you can put into this thing, because after all, it
is a business.
Kriken: I guess--that is very much experience. It’s really about how long it takes to get
an idea that everybody agrees to and then develop it to the appropriate level of
detail so that it can guide the work that the people are wanting to achieve--and
then still people agreeing to that.
Riess: You’re a teacher. How do you teach this?
Kriken: That’s hard. I guess all the students come with a professional degree in either
landscape or architecture, and so everybody thinks of a city, in some ways, as
like just multiple architectural projects. And they do not--they see it as all you
have to do is draw it in its architectural detail, and then you’re finished. But
they don’t understand that there are many other people that are going to
participate in that next round. There’ll be a whole lot of architects coming in to
do the specific buildings, and they will all want to do something that’s
uniquely theirs and has nothing to do with your thinking. So if you don’t
design the solution in such a way that you identify to the architects what’s
important in common, versus what they should enjoy and make their own, you
have not succeeded in doing this work. So that in teaching, the big problem, or
the big challenge I should say, is getting them to understand that. That it’s not
just doing the drawing, but thinking of how you convince people that these are
things that are important that others have to also agree to. You have to
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document your thinking in such a way that people will understand it, and the
people who are guiding those people will understand it. Because you won’t be
the client at that next level. Maybe you can critique it, but maybe not, and so
that everybody has to understand that. And of course, from a practice point of
view, the real scariness of it all is that people change. The campus facility
people you did a project for, they might be happy, then they leave. And then
the next person comes and they want to make your plan their own, and so it
goes into a tailspin. And particularly if you haven’t made it so clear, like those
two hundred pages of paper with little designs on it, so that it just seems so
logically correct and who could ever challenge this simple-minded thing--it will
fall apart. If there’s anything difficult in moving a complex plan forward, you
have to sort of think through what can be the challenges for the facilitators that
will make them say, “Well, screw it. Let’s get a new planner in and do this all
over again.”
Riess: Oh dear, yes!
Kriken: You have to make those arguments so crystal clear that they get it too, and
they’ll try to stay with it as long as they can.
Riess: How much of that is supported by prose? Is there a footnote for every thought
[that] has to be on paper?
Kriken: Well, you know, let me see--I have examples like UC Merced. I have all the
arguments that underlie the geometry.
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Riess: You’ve written them out?
Kriken: I’ve sketched them and then there’s captions or something, and many of them
are written out. The same for the architectural guidelines. Some things I don’t
care about, and I don’t bother to guide; they need guidance, but for example in
some situations I don’t care whether the sidewalk is eight-feet wide or ten-feet
wide. Stuff like that. It’s important, don’t get me wrong. But deep down inside
I don’t care, because I believe some things are just beyond your control over
decision-making. I do care about setback lines. I guess the key to teaching
urban design, uniquely from architecture or landscape, is to understand what
should be cared about and what can be left unstated. And then not only what,
but also how to convey it so that it can be understood when you’re not there
across the table.
Riess: That’s a very interesting and great statement of it. [interruption in recording].
Kriken: We are talking about the quad across from the Library at UC Berkeley, where
the temporary buildings were, between the Library and the North Side or the
new Asian Library that’s been put right across now from this green space. We
had an idea about that, kind of a general concept, and then we brought in
Richard Haag, a famous landscape architect from Seattle, to execute it. He
carefully did this topographic contouring of the site. He wanted to have a
simple path that would go down in front of the Bancroft Library. To my
outrage, the university did not coordinate that grading. Because of
handicapped requirements it had to be a certain percent grade, so they had to
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wiggle this path just to get the extra length to meet the grade alignment, and
just one thing after another.
Riess: That area is supposed to be a memorial to one of the wars, isn’t it?
Kriken: Yeah. Richard Haag was a member of the class of 1946, or I don’t know when it
was, ’47.
Riess: The design is a bowl, and that was your plan.
Kriken: Our plan, Phil Enquist developed it, had that green. Originally the campus was
planned with this great view corridor that went right down through the middle
of campus, and then they started putting buildings in it. They just used it as a
land bank. That’s what universities always do: anything that’s open space is a
land bank for future buildings. So we no longer had this corridor that went all
the way through the campus up to the Greek Theater, like the original master
plan. So we said, All right, it’s a series of parks, and there’s a kind of a winding
park-like road that goes from the entrance on the west side of the campus to
the upper side of the campus, and so it had to make a connection in this
curvilinear fashion, which it does. But the green space and how the memorial
would be realized was left up to Richard. I think it must have been a very
unhappy experience because the university screwed up almost every
conceivable way. He wanted to use a beautiful tree type, a Katsura tree which--
the leaves would just sparkle in the wind like olive trees. That disappeared,
and they have a mixed tree type of green now.
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Riess: Some places you want to revisit, others you don’t.
Kriken: Anyway, that’s probably not a very useful story.
[Tape 12: Side A]
Kriken: I believe that Jane Jacobs had the most to say about making good cities. Small-
grained, lively street level kind of activities that promote the kind of diversity
and variety of both services as well as people that we find in our best cities.
Riess: Jane Jacobs is still the one? Her thinking--nobody else has taken her place?
Kriken: Allan Jacobs carried her message from San Francisco. But from my point of
view, I don’t know anybody that was as clear and made such strong arguments
and was as successful in defeating--what was the name of the head of the
public works for New York? Robert Moses. She actually won in debates with
the most powerful development czar in America.
Riess: What do you believe are today’s most pressing problems?
Kriken: [missing transition here, much of the tape recording was very poor quality] These and
other experiences like the California Tomorrow Plan have led us to the
conclusion that we do need to think about how people settle on the land at a
large scale. It is not just people capturing property and ad hoc building on it,
and then figuring out how in the hell we get water to it and access and all that
sort of thing. One of the most important things that’s missing in America and
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elsewhere in the world is the state or the national government or some larger
entity taking responsibility for the land between cities. It’s like a free for all. It’s
like the highest bidder can take down scenic land; you can take down
agricultural land; you can build in hazard zones. It’s all up for grabs because
there’s no leadership, no responsibility for it. And then you end up--if it’s on
hazard land, like Malibu where it burns every three years, or Florida where a
storm takes down half the coast every three years--the taxpayers have to pay
for it. And the fact is that that should not be built on; we should not build on
agricultural land, particularly when we have to replace it and it takes more
water. If you take down prime agricultural land to build less prime agricultural
land of the same quality, it takes a huge investment and other resources to
equal what was there before. And there’s nobody monitoring or bringing that
before the public interest.
Riess: You worked on those issues in the California Tomorrow Plan, and in the book
you are writing?
Kriken: The book tries to link a lot of the environmental concerns to how we settle the
land, how we build our cities. We are going to be building almost as much
square footage as we already have in our cities in the next twenty years. Just
twenty years. A lot of our young students now in school will only be maybe
forty years old, at the beginning of their career, after they’ve been trained in
this and [are] working in it. It’s just fascinating to me. And there will be a
chance to rectify, hopefully, many of the mistakes, and there will also be,
hopefully, an increasingly ecologically minded public that would begin to see
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the connections between people having long drives to work and quality of life
and all of these other things that happen when you don’t have any kind of
serious framework to protect the lands outside of our cities, except for
greenbelts. I’ve been talking to people in China about this, and of course, they
have a much more authoritarian government. They might, if we could work
some of this out, they might be able to show the rest of the world how to
manage settlement. Here in the Bay Area, for example, we’re still building in
flood plains below the levee height in Stockton, which is all part of supporting
the population of the Bay Region. We shouldn’t be doing that, and everybody
knows there will be levee failure in a major earthquake. It could be another,
certainly different, but another Katrina waiting to happen. Now why are we
doing that? I don’t think anybody stopped people from building in this
circumstance. So it is an awareness function.
Riess: You say, “Why are we doing this?” Well, you and I aren’t doing it.
Kriken: Well, I guess it’s a belief that in this area, the free market may be still able to
make the best choices, and the government should stay out of it. I think,
obviously I like the variety and diversity that comes from a lot of people
participating in what a city turns out to be, in the Jane Jacobs spirit. But I also
think that there are areas of real stupidity, like building in hazard zones, that
the larger public should be protected from having to pay every time there’s a
disaster, and that we should have some kind of general, common feelings
about the preciousness of scenic and agricultural lands, and that only take
those away after the most careful consideration’s taken place. I don’t think food
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production should compete with housing value in a healthy market, because
we will, you know, at some point you hit the wall in terms of the ability to
provide fresh food that we know where it came from. We need some
thoughtful way to scribe a line between what should be free will, and what
should be recognized as public realm and public responsibility. It’s a little
bigger than what we’ve been working with for the past two hundred years in
our cities, but I think we’ve certainly been made aware of the consequences of
not doing it.
Riess: There are certainly many groups interested in saving this and that, and in the
environment.
Kriken: Some of the areas that have always taken the back seat to being protected and
thoughtfully considered is habitat: wetlands and migration corridors, all that
sort of thing. It seems like the time is getting more ripe for it, when we’re
starting to see species disappear, and certainly in the larger sense of global
warming there’s a real scariness about loss of the larger habitat for living
things.
Riess: Your students are one way to get out the word.
Kriken: [chuckling] I think it’s just part of the picture. I’d like to get a thousand teachers
with a similar message, and there probably are thousands that are focused on
cities, how we live upon the land and how so many of the concerns we have
emanate from those choices. Teaching the younger people is a way to help--I
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feel very positive about contributing to--how do I want to say this?--just
passing on some of the ideas that I’ve learned to other people as well as people
at Skidmore, because that’s a very hugely powerful and influential institution.
The degree to which we can stay on message, we can have an impact in that
way. I can’t think really of having any influence beyond these efforts. I have
over the years, as you know, been involved in many, many civic organizations
that try to guide the environment. Actually it’s for my own benefit and
learning as much as anything, but groups like Greenbelt Alliance, Bay
Conservation and Development Commission--I guess just the whole world of
nonprofit organizations that are interested in the environment are part of the
solution.
Riess: And that make a difference. You’re not saying that despite all of this nothing
has changed.
Kriken: Oh I think BCDC is one organization that’s made people recognize the
importance of the Bay in all its aspects, including the wetlands that have been
lost and now are being returned. It’s something like sixty thousand, and
sometimes I’ve heard eighty thousand acres put back into this kind of use.
Riess: It is a huge subject.
Kriken: You know, one thing about Nat Owings is that he had-- I guess it was probably
during the planning that we did for Washington, DC that David Childs was so
involved in…
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[End of Tape 12; Tape 12: Side B is blank]
[Tape 13: Side A]
Riess: You were talking about Nat Owings’s contacts in Washington.
Kriken: There was a lot of interest in Washington in doing research on ideas that would
answer all of the Great Society kinds of questions: inner city housing, inner city
transportation, all these types of programs. There were grants given for
research to try to uncover different approaches to these and many other
problems. All that came together; it was a great time, and Nat connected us
with projects like a project to study national land use by investment in federal
infrastructure, to repeat everything I told you before about protecting open
land and existing cities from disruptive development.
Riess: To pursue, in your thinking, or back there with Nat in Washington?
Kriken: Well, it was thinking that we did when Nat was alive that has never gone away
as a subject of interest and concern. So we had a particular take on it when we
did it, as a possibility and as a way of addressing the problems we discussed
before, of sprawl, loss of population, and the need for density in existing cities.
Riess: So those are two good things, the firm’s work and the students to come. I want
to leave it for now. We’ll get back to it. I don’t know where we--it’s just…
Kriken: I have sympathy for you!
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Riess: You’re a design advisor--what does it mean to be a design advisor? For
instance your work in Vietnam. Is this actually a role? Is that a position that
you have?
Riess: This project that has been the focus of my Vietnam involvement, this project
was to expand Ho Chi Minh City by eighteen kilometers by two kilometers
along its entire southern edge, and to prepare that land for--it sounds kind of
over the top, but for the next million people. The city, at the time we started,
was four million, four or five million, they didn’t really know, and it’s probably
now closer to ten million. So it’s growing very fast--the birth rate and people
migrating in from the agricultural rural lands. And it’s interesting, because it
parallels a little bit the discussion of Canary Wharf, because I kept thinking
that the downtown of Ho Chi Minh City, previously Saigon, had a charm and
character that really could be very positive for the city, just for tourism and for
people to come and to enjoy this green, basically low-rise city. I wanted to get
to the…
Riess: Green? In the sense that it’s green, not green.
Kriken: Not green from a sustainability sense, but green as in trees and plants and
flowers and gardens and parks. And so, I thought that they should be very
careful where they put their new buildings. And of course, in those early days,
land was very cheap compared to any other Asian city. Developers from all
over Asia were interested in the ultimate opportunity. They could buy up
anything. They could probably buy the city hall and tear it down! I meant that
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Riess: Of the city.
as a joke, because I don’t think they could have bought the city hall, but
virtually everything was up for grabs, and they had no historical district idea
or way of thinking about what was valuable from the past and what could be
changed for the future. I would meet with the city architect every time I came
to Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh City, to meet on Saigon South; I always had an
additional day or an afternoon meeting with the chief architect and his staff to
discuss his city growth problems. I think he was called supreme architect.
Kriken: Of the city. And I would do a kind of a chalkboard discussion, and I would talk
about all these things: what we’ve learned, and what other cities in the world
have learned about historic preservation, particularly. And then, in the lobby
they always had a model they were working on of Ho Chi Minh City. It started
out with a few towers in it. Every time I came back, as much as I would preach
about [how] the city should be carefully considered, there would be more tall
buildings than I left! [chuckling] Until finally it looked like some vision of Hong
Kong, I guess, that it would just be all tall buildings and everything that I had
talked about was gone. But the supreme architect was struggling with the
politics of development, and I think--every time somebody said, “What about
this piece of property? What could I build?” he would put a new tall building
in.
Riess: He wasn’t thinking of Saigon South in the same way that you were.
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Kriken: Well, I think he was very sympathetic, I really honestly do. He was an
honorable man, and I think he was very sympathetic. That model didn’t
necessarily represent what he thought the future would be, but it was a device
that he could work with his government officials and staff. Because we never
stopped doing that, and what was really exciting to me is that the staff, in the
beginning would listen quietly and we’d say, “Now do you have any
questions?” And they would be quiet, they would nod their heads about the
kind of things we were talking about, but there was no challenge. But after
doing this for a year or more, it was great, because they all started asking
questions. All the staff asked pointed questions, and especially they would
challenge me if I’d shown them an example that wasn’t consistent with some
principle I had discussed earlier. And so I had to backpedal and defend myself
[chuckling]. But I thought it was positive, and it was a way of educating a group
of people. Now the people that were staff are in leadership positions. Oh, I just
remembered--one of the first things that happened when I started there is that
a developer was permitted to build a building just behind city hall, and it was
blue, its original color. There were articles about how did that happen, articles
in the English version of the Vietnam daily newspaper. The chief architect,
supreme architect, was really stewing about this, and they didn’t know
whether they should ask the developer to take some stories off to lower the
building, because it destroyed the prominence of the view of city hall from this
beautiful French boulevard that approached it. They decided instead on
putting a mirror glass façade on it, so that it would just reflect the sky and it
would be invisible. I told them that wouldn’t work, but they did it anyway,
and it had almost the opposite effect: it made it more gaudy in relationship to
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the beautiful French silhouetted building. Eventually they did take stories off.
But it was remarkable how much like San Francisco politics [chuckling] it was in
those days, because there was so much concern about how and where tall
buildings should be and how it might spoil the city’s character if they were
erected in the wrong place or were not of a high enough quality. That was the
story of working with the chief architect’s office as an advisor.
Riess: You’re still working on Saigon South, is that right?
Kriken: I still am working on Saigon South. Phase I is not completely built, but there’s a
plan for every unbuilt parcel of land. It has been an incredible success; the
architecture has been designed by a lot of talented young people, not large
firms or well-known people. It is probably the finest development that they’ve
been able to achieve in all of Vietnam, and it’s become a kind of model for how
they would like their city to grow. Having concluded, pretty much, the initial
phase of Saigon South, we are now working on another. We’re calling it
University City, because we’re trying to incorporate into it the sites for
potentially four universities. The purpose here is to develop a higher-education
program that would allow the Vietnamese students to successfully compete to
enter overseas universities to do graduate work in extended education.
Vietnam has had this very high literacy, almost the highest in the world. But at
this university level they have not been able to develop students that competed
well internationally, and so we’re trying to set this up as a next phase.
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Riess: I wonder if they’ll have dedicated English-language cities like the Koreans do.
That seems to be how they’re setting themselves up to compete.
Kriken: And they certainly are sending out a lot of students and they are getting in. At
Berkeley, for example, in my small class on urban design, fifteen people, there’s
always at least three Koreans. So they are getting the proper language training
and the other ways people are tested, their qualifications for graduate school.
This experience has been so interesting to see a city go from almost all bicycles,
no stoplights, and really run down in many ways to…
Riess: This is Ho Chi Minh City.
Kriken: I’m talking about Ho Chi Minh City in the time period of 1993 or so, when the
first trade opened up with America, and we were allowed to work there. To
have just experienced--there were no taxicabs or anything, just all of the slow
but sure qualities of being a city. And to see it change in such a short space of
time--these events are unbelievably educational because even I, prior to these
Asian experiences, saw cities as very slow moving, slow changing. It just made
all of us who’ve worked there and in other Asian cities so much more aware of
the rapidity of change, even in our own country. But it’s just harder to see here
than it is over there. And to see that cities really are very organic, very--we
talked earlier in this interview about adaptability, how they have to be
adaptable. That’s part of a good design. Architects who are asked to design
landmark buildings rarely consider that a city must continue to renew itself
well after their buildings have served their useful purpose. Anyway, you do
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have this impression, and in actual fact it gives you much more positive faith in
the future, that things really can be reversed; negative things can be reversed
and new ways can be found to go about our business in a healthier way.
Riess: That’s good. What can you say about being a design advisor to São Paulo?
Kriken: To be a design advisor to São Paulo, I have to admit I don’t know how useful
or how significant our engagement was for them, but it was great for us! This
assignment I owe to Kathrin Moore who managed our urban design studio. I
enjoyed the people there so much, and seeing how they approach problem
solving, which is so different. I’d read about this before, but then to see it
actually take place. The method isn’t about making endless environmental
impact studies to try to anticipate all the nuanced ways a new idea will
positively or negatively impact an area. They don’t do that, and come to think
of it, the Chinese don’t particularly care to do that either, but in South America
they really don’t do that. What they will do instead is that they will try it out.
They will try to figure out some way to test it. If it’s about closing streets or
trying some new transportation corridor, whatever it is, their idea is to test it,
real-time testing. If the idea fails, they’ll say, “Okay, it was not a good idea.
We’ll put it back the way it was.” Or if it works out, then they will begin to
make that idea less of a mockup and more of a real thing.
Riess: So you’re talking at the ground level.
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Kriken: If you have an idea in the States, they will want to study it. It isn’t my idea, but
it could be an idea put forward by anybody--and we study it. And then there’ll
be all of the input from people and everything, and it’ll take three or four years
to be at a point where everybody’s comfortable: we should try it. But there, the
trying is almost immediate. You know, if they like it, it’s like, “Hey!” In the
enthusiasm they’ll do it. The city Curitiba is famous for this method. They’ve
had many mayors continue this process, but there’s a mayor named Jaime
Lerner who is most famous for doing this.
Riess: São Paulo was already a big, a done city, wasn’t it?
Kriken: Yeah, but it’s growing and changing in all of its different ways, and it’s huge,
fifteen million persons or something like that.
Riess: Wasn’t Brasilia supposed to be a model city that the rest of Brazil would learn
from?
Kriken: It’s possible. It was certainly intended to be a one-design city, very carefully
designed. Oscar Niemeyer, bless his soul, he’s a hundred years old now, he
and--what’s the city planner’s name? [Lucio Costa]--they made this into
another kind of Washington, DC, where all the buildings were highly related.
The town that was built by the construction people is supposed to be where all
the liveliness is, but I’ve never been there to know that. None of their [other]
cities has the kind of institutional order of Brasilia. The other designer I
remember was Roberto Burle Marx, the famous landscape architect. I first met
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Riess: Yes, yes.
him when we were planning the San Antonio World’s Fair. We wanted him to
do a garden, and I’m sorry to say it did not happen.
Kriken: His brother was the Marx that was the conductor for the Philadelphia
Symphony Orchestra [Walter Burle Marx].
Riess: You’ve enjoyed working with the Brazilians.
Kriken: I’d say that I got more back from them than they probably got from me,
although I emptied my mind--every single hare-brained idea I’d ever heard of
from the United States or learned from experience elsewhere, I dutifully told
them about. [chuckling]
Riess: What was the forum for doing this?
Kriken: The idea was to try to save the historic center of São Paulo. There was a group
that was called Pro Centro, just exactly what it sounds like, for the central area.
Let me try to think--they were trying to find ways to bring this part of the city
back. I have a feeling I’ve mentioned this to you in an earlier interview. But
every morning, along a narrow street corridor, people would transfer from one
transit hub to another. Six million people in the morning would go one way,
and in the evening six million people would go back. Imagine! That’s like the
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whole Bay Area going down a thirty-foot wide street! Back and forth each day.
Just stuff like that was mind blowing.
Riess: Yes, and it was working.
Kriken: Well, it was working in ways, but in other ways it wasn’t working. The fact
that they had to close so many streets in the downtown meant that a lot of the
downtown buildings had gone vacant, and had broken windows. And they
were all concrete buildings. Didn’t I talk about this before? Let me just tell you.
You can x it out if it’s already been talked about. But they were concrete
buildings, and they were all basically twenty to thirty-five stories, or something
like that. So it was a very dense city. And they were zero lot line towers, so that
when there was not a tower immediately next to the other, there was a concrete
blank wall. Those were dirt stained and rust streaked. It was just looking bad,
and they had this idea--this is just one of the ideas--do you remember this?
Riess: They were going to paint…
Kriken: And they were going to paint murals. I thought, All of those murals, different
designs, everything, it’s just going to look like, at a smaller scale, some of our
graffiti-covered buildings in America. So that’s the story, and then they created
Paint São Paulo. When we returned, four hundred buildings had been painted.
Riess: [Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area] TEDA, in Tianjin, China.
Is that something that got built? It’s in Tianjin, or is it not?
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Kriken: Let me see. Oh, TEDA, okay, sorry. That was a new town outside of Tianjin,
and we were invited to plan a residential neighborhood. Quickly, the challenge
there, which is maybe the best approach we’ve ever used was: How do we do
something that creates variety and diversity in housing in an area where
everything has to have south sunlight, and buildings have to be spaced so that
they all receive south sunlight for two hours every day of the year?
Riess: Why was that a requirement?
Kriken: It must go back to a time when their energy was unreliable, but it actually
[Tape 13: Side B]
seems like a nice goal for everybody. You would always want at least one hour
or two hours of sunlight a day to come inside your house and…
Kriken: This project is being built; it was a demonstration of mixing units, even taller
buildings, including parks and small blocks, and all the ideas that we believe
makes for variety, pedestrian comfort, the presence of green open space, a
sense of place--both as a neighborhood and your block and the building you
live in, for China, given this strict rule. Every residential project in China is a
new challenge to try to find a new way to do this and still meet their criteria.
Riess: You must be grateful when there are some kinds of constraints.
Kriken: Well, you know, I think these will all be very popular places to live, and sought
after, if people have a choice. You cannot imagine how monotonous [it is to
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see] row upon row of the same height buildings, spaced exactly the same
amount apart in order to receive its dose of sunlight, something that is so
extraordinarily institutional-looking as compared to our alternatives that have
more variety, so that’s what the story of that was.
Riess: What is Electronic Arts, on Redwood Shores?
Kriken: They are the people who make electronic games, and we designed a campus
Riess: Please do.
for them. I’ll tell you, if I may, the story about how we acquired that job.
Kriken: We went to an interview, and in the interview, because so much of my
background has to do with Hewlett-Packard, I explained the Hewlett-Packard
approach, which was to try to create some way of addressing the property so
that it would have both a sense of being a campus and still you could exit the
property without having to give up the whole thing. It was an interesting
approach that had to do with facility management.
Riess: Hewlett-Packard, can you set the stage again?
Kriken: Hewlett-Packard, when I first interviewed with them, they had something like
sixty million square feet of buildings all over the world, and because of the way
they built their buildings and the way they put them on the land, I was told
that the resale of the projects weren’t worth much more than the land itself.
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They didn’t think about the real estate value or the real estate qualities of what
they had been developing. If they wanted to knock one facility down by 50
percent, they could not make strategic moves within their company, because
the buildings had no value. Another tenant would not come to those sites,
because they would always be seen as part of the Hewlett-Packard campus.
They could not have their own separate identity. Our recommendation was to
develop an addressing road that the buildings fronted, which had a public
character, so it could be all Hewlett-Packard or half Hewlett-Packard or
whatever; and that they should develop the office and research aspect of any
given location in a more traditional office building type that was a B-plus
quality in the market that they were developing, whether it was Madrid,
Tokyo, or Geneva, or wherever in the world, it would be like that; and that
they should build a single story manufacturing building which could be built
cheaply. Before this policy change, they were integrating manufacturing and
office in the same big- footprint buildings. For this flexibility they had to
reinforce the structure and provide more electrical. In every way, these were
more expensive buildings, and at the same time they had less real estate value.
So we applied this philosophy over the whole HP world, and I enjoyed
traveling to all of their locations. For a while we were their in-house architects.
We were even reviewing the plans of other architects and making
recommendations of how they should change the plan to meet this new
criterion; it was an interesting and unusual assignment for SOM.
Riess: Why was it unusual?
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Kriken: Because generally, I would not say never, but generally we do one building for
a client at a time, or one site plan at a time. We don’t often have the
opportunity to be part of a longer-term, in-house consulting activity.
Riess: That’s different from the design people who do one building for Walter
Shorenstein and then ten more.
Kriken: For HP the problem was global, and in recent years I’ve been working for the
same clients in Asia, but this was a time when the opportunities were fewer.
Riess: So Electronic Arts.
Kriken: So Electronic Arts came along, and it was this Hewlett-Packard story that
appealed to these people also, although they did not know how big they were
going to ultimately be. But they liked the idea of having flexibility--and who
wouldn’t? It makes perfect sense. So we applied these principles. There is some
surface parking, but it’s mainly for visitors, and most of the parking is in
parking garages. But the other thing that became unique about Electronic Arts
is that we learned that there were fewer and fewer large corporate
headquarters sites, and that they were now smaller, and that to anticipate
future needs they had to be denser. So suddenly we were talking about eight-
and ten-story buildings, not two- and three-story buildings. And that, in our
minds, marked the beginning of the next generation of Silicon Valley-type
work.
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Riess: That’s interesting. What you’re saying also, about the intrinsic real estate value
of a building, people don’t necessarily think about that, because they’re not
developers, they’re manufacturers.
Kriken: Right. Their first priority is the product. I think a lot of companies are still
oblivious to the kind of asset value they potentially could have versus what
they have.
Riess: Now I’m going to page two of this list! State Street, Chicago, why were you
there?
Kriken: Phil Enquist was in charge of this project. I have this story in my book. It was
another one of those problems, where when you close a street, there are always
unintended consequences, like suddenly it’s pedestrian unfriendly, believe it or
not. Even though you’ve made it all pedestrian, it just becomes like a big sea of
space to walk in, and it doesn’t feel crowded and lively anymore. And
consequently all the property values went down, businesses moved out, and
discount stores came in. It’s a very famous street, State Street, Main Street. And
so we put the street back in and put in flowers and trees, and now it’s a great
success again.
Riess: I didn’t realize there was that history of State Street. When I was there about a
year ago I was amazed to see the plantings, and I wondered how that lovely
urban thing had gotten itself organized?
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Kriken: By the way, there’s a nice story about Mayor [Richard M.] Daley. All the
flowers you find on major sidewalks in Chicago, which are so beautiful--and
some he plants four times a year so you have four bloom seasons for the
flowers--he views that as representing good government to the public. If a
government body is so responsible that it can even take care of the smallest
little flowers on the street, it reflects good management. He sees it, in a very
subliminal way, as enhancing his presence in the community.
Riess: Interesting, isn’t it?
Kriken: Isn’t it though? And something that is a wonderful insight which many cities
could benefit from.
Riess: For the San Francisco Airport International Terminal Competition, your role
was planning director?
Kriken: You know, during the competition the other partners, Carolina Woo and
myself, critiqued the plan as it was emerging, but it really came out of Craig
[W.] Hartman and our structural department, the gee-whiz part of it. And then
later on we got involved in planning the outside circulation systems as you
come into the airport, all those bridges and trains and cars going around.
Riess: Yes, it’s scary for a minute.
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Kriken: It is; it looks like one of those images from the ‘20s of the future city, floating in
the sky.
Riess: You’re on the design review boards of UC Berkeley, San Diego, and San
Francisco--that’s design review for the campuses?
Kriken: For campuses. I’m not simultaneously involved, but I have been involved in all
of those over the years.
Riess: Somehow I was thinking that that was also jurying student work, but that’s not
the same.
Kriken: No, but it could be reviewing buildings or participating in the architect
selection for a particular building on the campus.
Riess: Are there any good anecdotes about that?
Kriken: Well, one anecdote is that Richard Bender and I--he helped me on the UC San
Diego campus master plan, actually created a design review board, and then
we were among the first members of it, to create a function that previously
didn’t exist that would provide a peer review or a larger review of the
appropriateness of a building proposal than would otherwise be reviewed by
facility people or the professors who were behind the funding. So it brought in
a professional set of eyes to help make those choices and then to review the
building as it goes through its design phases.
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Riess: The current Berkeley campus. Are you involved at all?
Kriken: No, I’m not, no.
Riess: There’s new construction on the north side. Amazing buildings visible through
other buildings.
Kriken: I haven’t been over there. I go up Strawberry Creek on my way to teach. But I
will check that out--since the new Asian Library is on the north side. I’ll take a
look at it. [interruption in recording] These new engineering lab buildings are
getting to be huge. And if they’re not carefully located and developed at the
ground level, they can destroy the walkability of the campus, because you have
to walk around these things and they could be five hundred feet long. Because
they’re the most expensive buildings on the campus, they try to create as much
efficiencies as they can, which usually means make it one building as opposed
to two or three buildings. Some could be enormously benefited by having
pedestrian pass-throughs in the middle so they don’t become a barrier to
campus life. So this is a new building type for campuses.
Riess: Okay, thank you. Tell me why the Sunday Afternoon Watercolor Society is so
important for you?
Kriken: Well, I sometimes feel that that will be the one way I’m remembered
[chuckling]. Sometimes when I give a talk I get introduced as, “The founder of
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the Sunday Afternoon Watercolor Society,” and I would say, Well, maybe
that’s the real tag that will stay.
Riess: But seriously, is this where you have the most fun?
Kriken: It’s never stressful for me, but it’s a way of being in a city, sitting in one place,
even a city that you know so well like my city here or the Bay Region, and just
observing it over several hours, instead of taking a snapshot and running, and
taking another snapshot. So you just get a feeling for the rhythm of how it’s
used. It could be neighborhoods or parks or shorelines, all over. So that’s one
part. The other part I like is just the quiet time, and I especially liked that when
I was in my whirlwind days.
Riess: So you do it solo.
Kriken: No, no, I do it with other people. On any given meeting there’s ten or twelve
people, but we don’t talk to each other until we’re finished.
Riess: And somebody decides where you’re going?
Kriken: I decide where.
Riess: You decide.
242

Kriken: I decide where we’re going, and we put on a yearly exhibit with fellow
painters. That’s more of a party for our friends. We don’t do it with the idea
that people have to buy our work, it’s just for ourselves and our friends to see if
we’ve improved at all over the past year or we’re still in a rut.
Riess: Is it the same people who started out together?
Kriken: No, it’s changed. There are some from the early days, but it’s mostly more
recent members. They’re similar, similar people. I started out thinking we
would have a picnic, then paint afterward, but the picnic took too long. So we
abandoned the picnic and we just paint, and then we have a little critique after
each session. We also might have a social time together, but the actual painting
is very interesting because you can erase everything in your mind and just
focus on the subject and how you can interpret it in watercolor. I enjoy it very
much in that way. Then the people are friends, and some of them are people I
never would have met except through the watercolor society. So I enjoy that
part of it, too.
Riess: People have brought people?
Kriken: Yeah, and there’s no screening for membership, it’s just if you would like to
spend time doing this, just come. And I don’t call people up and tell them to
come. I give them a list of the year’s destinations and all the dates and time.
Everybody has that and they put it on their refrigerator or something and keep
track of it. And we’ve been doing this for twenty-eight years!
243

Riess: That part of the job many people would like to turn over to someone else.
Kriken: Yeah, but for some reason I haven’t done it, I don’t know why. I always feel
that it’s up to me to find the places, and it’s interesting to me that I can still find
places that a lot of the people have never been to before.
Riess: Where were you last week and where will you be this week? I want to watch. It
sounds like a phenomenon in and of itself.
Kriken: [stepping away to look for the sheet] I can give you a schedule so that you can
come and paint. Every year it’s the same format, “view of city from Pier 14.”
That’s a new pier. Stow Lake--we did that about ten, twelve years ago, but
anyway I thought we’d revisit it. Hyde Street Pier is now open to the public
and I thought we can paint the swim clubs; we haven’t done that for a long
time. Mountain View Cemetery--there’s a hill there with these wonderful
Greek and Egyptian, all kinds of incredible buildings that were mausoleums to
very wealthy families from the Bay Region, and that’s fascinating to paint.
We’ve done that before, but always when we go back and visit a site there are
always changes.
Riess: Okay, down to the wire! Why did you retire from SOM? Did you have to?
Kriken: There’s always been a very healthy idea at Skidmore that the older generation
should make room for the next generation coming up, because it’s all about
renewal.
244

[Tape 14: Side A]
Kriken: We [SOM] are not interested in some single set of people who have made the
reputation of the firm and then they retire and then the firm’s gone; instead
there is always this process of continuing renewal. And there have been
various ways that people have retired out of the firm or have been asked to
retire over the years. But recently there’s been a decision that, I think at sixty-
two, or something like that, you will assume the role of consulting partner as
opposed to your having an ownership position. And then as a consulting
partner, you might work full- time on a salary. I, on the other hand, have
decided to be on a three-day-a-week schedule.
Riess: Those are days on which you actually go to the office.
Kriken: Let’s just say the number of hours that I try to make myself available to the
firm. I’ve done that principally so I could provide more in-house consulting.
With a few important exceptions, some clients here in the States and in Asia, I
don’t want to be going to client meetings all the time, because that’s the
responsibility that creates the whirlwind travel environment. Ellen Lou has
taken on this role. If you’re the person that is supposed to be leading the job,
then you have to be at every client meeting. And that’s why I flew two million
miles in little more than ten years, because it was just that kind of craziness. I’d
be on the airplane for long-distance trips I would say almost always every third
weekend.
Riess: Every third weekend.
245

Kriken: And then I would spend a week to recuperate, the first weekend I’m home I do
my errands, the second weekend I’m home, and then I would be on the plane
again. I’m happy not to be on this schedule anymore
Riess: So you won’t be at the meetings. You feel other people can do it?
Kriken: They have to learn how to do it. First of all, everybody has already done it
together with me before; it isn’t like I go by myself all the time. So they’re ready
to do it. I still, particularly in Asian cultures being now older, I have a lot more
respect and people don’t argue with me, because of deference for my age, and
it’s different for them! They have to fight for their ideas. [laughter]
Riess: In preparing your junior colleagues for going to these meetings, do you maybe
present the arguments in a role-playing way?
Kriken: You know, I try to teach everybody that they have to think of their presentation
as telling a story, so it really is clear and understandable, not just a bunch of
disassociated facts, which I find my students often do, and I have to get into
training with them. And then also to try to show choices; we talked about that
already; so the client can feel comfortable that it’s not just some personal taste
thing on my part or our part, that it is something that has been thoughtfully
considered. That’s my new routine and schedule.
Riess: And you don’t have to bring in jobs anymore.
246

Kriken: I don’t, but I do sometimes because people know me, so there are jobs that
come in from contacts I have.
Riess: But you don’t feel that you have to shepherd them through.
Kriken: No. I’ve explained, “John, I came to SOM because of you,” and I say, “Oh,
wonderful, well, Craig Hartman or Ellen Lou will give you the best possible
service.” [laughing]
Riess: Yes. New topic. Did 9/11 influence your architecture, your thinking about
anything?
Kriken: I was horrified by what this might mean for cities. Because of the security for
everything the whole nature of the public realm would be compromised. But
then I found one silver lining in all this. After 9/11 there was a concern from a
lot of public buildings that a half-ton truck, driving fifty miles an hour, full of
explosives, could crash into the building and then blow up and create serious
damage. We were asked to deal with this for the Federal Reserve Bank, but
instead of putting up bollards we used planting beds full of flowers that would
stop the vehicle. So I thought, Hmmm, maybe we can turn this into a plus
rather than a negative.
Riess: Do you think urban design is gaining strength?
247

Kriken: I think it is gaining the respect--just to add a word on that--the respect of my
colleagues that urban design is something important and something that we all
should be part of, an awareness that the firm has, beyond what work I do, an
urban design sensibility in all the things we do.
Riess: You don’t think that would have just happened if you hadn’t done it? Was it in
the wind?
Kriken: I think it’s more now, especially as we’re doing bigger projects, so that there’s
more reference to it and consideration of it now than ever before. When I think
of the beginning, there was very little, except for people like Bruce Graham,
who kept saying always to the partnership, We are not an architecture firm; we
are designing cities. Not in the way I design cities, but because we do so many
buildings in any given city that we have to think about the impact and the
responsibility we have.
Riess: The urban design component came first to San Francisco before it came to
Chicago and to New York?
Kriken: You know, I’d like to say that, but there were San Francisco people that moved
to Washington, DC to work on the Washington Mall, and I think that was a
sensibility that went from San Francisco to there. And then, not too long after
that was started, I came to San Francisco and with Jerry Goldberg again; we
had a strong center that was doing this work that was nationally, if not
internationally, recognized. Then Chicago started thinking differently about
248

urban design, in that their initial idea about urban design was just to have a
person on board who would go figure out all the city constraints on a piece of
property--height, setback, and make any kind of judgments about what the
setting was. But it was strictly related to the architectural projects. And that
ultimately changed, especially under Phil [Enquist’s] leadership.
Riess: Going on with these questions, tell me about partners you admired, and why?
Kriken: I’ve talked about Marc a bit and I’ve talked about a Chicago partner, a
structural engineer named Fazlur [R.] Khan. And I thought he was one of my
best partners. He would give me great critiques of the cities I was working on,
because he could “become” the ambulance driver or “become” a fireman, and
sort of force me to figure out how various things could be dealt with when I
was trying to close streets or make cul-de-sacs. He would keep coming back,
How does it work, in all these various ways. I really enjoyed him. I think many
people liked him for many different reasons, but he was our most famous
structural engineer. Some of the SOM partners that I had the privilege of
meeting were special because they were so willful and strong and sure of
themselves. They were just unique in that way. It was maybe hard to get close
to them in any personal way, but you just said to yourself, Where do these
people come from? And they had a powerful influence in the profession.
Riess: And they were design partners?
249

Kriken: These could be design partners--like Bruce Graham and Gordon Bunshaft.
They were very powerful figures in the profession, and they [pause]--I don’t
know how to say it, but they believed in hierarchy. [chuckling] On the West
Coast we have a more of an open-ended, equality-based philosophy in the way
we work with people.
Riess: The equivalent out here was Chuck Bassett.
Kriken: And Chuck, I would like to say something about Chuck. There are many ways
that we loved Chuck, and he was a very gifted designer, but as much as
anything it was his human qualities that we really warmed up to. He was very
much his own person. He had all the good qualities of a John Wayne figure. “I
believe in this, and that’s, by God, what I’m going to tell you.” But he still did it
in a softer and more thoughtful way, is all I can say. He had a nice way with
people and he was open. Anybody could go in and talk to him, and that was
very different than the Chicago and New York group. They were like gods.
Riess: How did Chuck Bassett hold his own at the partners’ meetings? How did he
work with the other alpha males?
Kriken: I think there was strength of conviction that he could bring forward when he
was dealing particularly with his partners. But I think that the quality of his
design was such that he always had their respect. He was hired by Nat, and he
certainly had Nat’s strong support all through those years.
250

Riess: This question: did Skidmore, Owings, Merrill address the central questions of
the time 1970 to 2000? What were the central questions?
Kriken: I do think that we were always trying to find the larger cause or the larger
foundation for what it was we were working on in this area of urban design. I
think in other ways--the larger design of the office I always respected because
they were trying to deal with what is the future of building design,
aesthetically, technically, and in all other ways. For many years I think
everybody was convinced the firm was at the cutting edge of that. And maybe
we fell back during the Postmodern time, because that was a denial of
whatever the aesthetic people were driving for in Modern architecture.
Riess: Everybody fell back you said?
Kriken: We fell back by using less technical skill and more historic reference, I guess, in
design, whether it was a solid wall with punched windows or something else.
So that was a bad time for the firm, but it was a bad time for architecture in
general. Kevin Roche, the architect who did the Oakland Museum, who was a
fine architect, he fell back to doing buildings with Egyptian motifs. Everybody
was going crazy. I never did get involved in New Urbanism as a philosophy
that had to do with our time. I thought it did contribute to suburban
neighborhood density and walkability. What I disliked was the nostalgia for
early 20 th century residential architecture. It’s a very sad comment on America.
Riess: That’s what New Urbanism is?
251

Kriken: Well, it’s probably a little derogatory to say it that way, but it really is. It’s
about cottage houses with front porches on tree-lined streets, and if there could
be a little ice cream parlor down the block that would be perfect. I think I’ve
said it earlier, but about 90 percent of the brain power in city design in the last
twenty years has been trying to develop or perfect that suburban New
Urbanism model, and that’s probably because there is so much new work in
suburbia versus cities, up until recently.
Riess: And do you have a dream project?
Kriken: I guess if there’s a dream project it would be going back to something that
[Tape 14: Side B]
could have real impact on what we talked about earlier, which would be the
way we use or protect the land between cities, and thoughtfully diversify
existing cities.
Kriken: I’ve worked on, I won’t say always successfully, but I’ve worked on just about
every other kind of project there is in the world. I don’t know how many
projects--did you ever count how many projects? Four hundred, or three
hundred?
Riess: Are there things you did that you sure wish you hadn’t done?
252

Kriken: I think, with the exception of working in some places that were just depressing,
I think my work has been fun and I’ve always found some redeeming quality
to every place I’ve worked.
Riess: And your book, Building Cities for the 21st Century, is that a capstone of your
career?
Kriken: No, it is not. I wanted this book to teach urban design. I didn’t want the book to
be a summary of my professional life. I want it to be forward-looking and
asking questions that the next generation can work on. It really has brought up
hundreds of more things to write about. Hopefully, it’s not the last time SOM
people will do a project like this book. I think it is a first for SOM, because it
has educational ambitions. I won’t say much more till it’s out and we see how
people feel about it, but it should be easy to read and to make the subject
accessible to non-professionals.
Riess: Is the world changing so rapidly that you have to keep tweaking chapters?
Kriken: That’s interesting. In this book I’m trying to outline a process for design that
puts forward best practice principles. The way you interpret the principle
varies by climate and culture and the kind of physical setting it’s located in.
These are general universal things, which is risky because many people will try
to find the exception to the rule. We however also say, “Well, why don’t you
make your own list of principles that you believe defines livability.” [laughter]
253

Riess: That’s good.
Kriken: Or add to, or take away from our list, or whatever. I keep thinking if I do any
more writing it’s going to be magazine article-scaled rather than a book,
because then you can keep in mind the beginning and end — the book has
always seemed like a big mountain I have to climb. There’s always some new
thing. But an article is so finite that I can easily manage the beginning and end
and the graphics and everything.
Riess: How close to finished is it?
Kriken: It has been sent off to Princeton [Princeton Architectural Press].
Riess: Somewhere along the way they will do you the favor of having an editor,
won’t they?
Kriken: Oh yeah, there’ll be still another editor. And then it will take, they say, one year
after it’s in their hands! [chuckling] So it just goes on and on. But it’s been
challenging to think about and it’s helped me with my teaching experience and
so it all fits together.
Riess: I think you should go on the lecture circuit with your ideas.
Kriken: Well, thank you. I hope to do that when the book is published.
254

Riess: Any final thoughts to end this oral history?
Kriken: In this interview I’ve talked mostly about myself. I’d like to take a final
moment and think about some of the people who have helped me over the
years. Let me begin first with SOM. Jerry Goldberg, I have discussed earlier,
but he was my soul- and teammate during my first years with the firm.
Kathrin Moore goes back to San Antonio River days. She worked on many of
our best projects, becoming manager of the studio for most of my time with
the firm, and is today a Planning Commissioner for the City of San Francisco.
Phil Enquist was my number one designer and today is the partner in charge
of urban design for the Chicago office and oversees the practice firm-wide.
Ellen Lou now leads the urban design studio in San Francisco, and the studio
has never been stronger in talent or larger in size. Craig Hartman is a leading
architect and planning talent within SOM and has become my adopted
younger brother. Marc Goldstein was, in my early years, my mentor and
design partner and is now my adopted older brother. Carolina Woo was my
managing partner for all of our early successful China work and is now my
sister. It’s a lot like an extended family. Outside SOM, I have a debt to Allan
Jacobs, past planning director to the City of San Francisco and now emeritus
professor at UC Berkeley. Donlyn Lyndon and Richard Bender, both
professors with UC Berkeley, have given me valuable advice. Three of my
Sunday Afternoon Watercolor Society members Chris Grubbs, Norman
Kondy, and Michael Reardon continue to make our projects look beautiful.
And finally Katherine Koelsch, my wife, who keeps me moving forward.
And thanks to you Suzanne, this has been fun, a memorable experience but I
have to stop for now. I’m late for a meeting downtown.
255

256

Books and Articles by John Lund Kriken
SELECTED REFERENCES
"The Art of Project Packaging." Architecture in Government, San Francisco AIA Newsletter, June
1980.
"The Arts and City Livability." In The Arts and City Planning, edited by Robert Porter. New
York: American Council for the Arts, 1980.
"A Blueprint for Urban Growth." Architecture California [CCAIA Newsletter] 8, no. 3,
May/June 1986.
City Building: Nine Principles for the 21 st Century. New York: Princeton Architectural Press,
Spring 2010.
"Creating a Framework, Mission Bay, San Francisco." In Waterfronts: A New Frontier for Cities
on Water, edited by Rinio Bruttomesso. Venice: International Centre Cities on Water, 1993.
Developing Urban Design Mechanisms, with Irene Perlis Torrey. Chicago: American Society of
Planning Officials, 1973.
"Four Recent Suburban Design Projects from SOM, San Francisco." UD Review 9, no. 2,
Spring 1986.
"HemisFair ’68: Its Impact on San Antonio." World’s Fair 13, no. 4, December 1993.
"Lessons from Downtown San Jose." Places 15, no. 2, Winter 2003.
"Physical Plans and Implementation in Urban Design." In Proceedings of the First National
Conference on Urban Design, edited by Ann Ferebee. Washington, DC: RC Publications, 1978.
"Principles of Campus Master Planning." Planning for Higher Education 32, no. 4, 2004.
"A Search for New Values - The Future of the Metropolitan Bay Area." San Francisco
Architects Review [SFAIA] 33, Summer 1986. Guest editor.
"This is a Special Place, Take Care of It." San Francisco Urban Institute [SFUI] Quarterly 1, no.
4, Spring 1998.
"Town Planning and Cultural and Climate Responsiveness." In Design for Arid Regions,
edited by Gideon Golany. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983.
"The Transect." Places 18, no. 2, Summer 2006.
"UC Merced – Time Will Tell." Places 17, no. 2, 2005.
"Urban Design." In The Practice of Local Government Planning. Washington, DC: International
City Management Association, 1979.
257

Urban Design: Process, Products and Implementation. International City Management
Association, Management Information Service Report 11, no. 7, July 1979.
"Urban Design Stories." The Mayors' Institute on City Design West. Berkeley: University of
California, 1997.
"What’s Wrong with Small Projects?" UD Review 6, Spring/Summer 1983.
Selected Sources
"2 California Firms Find Door is Open in Vietnam." Los Angeles Times, April 4, 1996.
Adams, Nicholas. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: SOM since 1936. Milan: Electa Architecture,
2007.
"The California Tomorrow Plan: A First Sketch." EKISTICS 32, no. 189, August 1971.
Christie, M.B. "The Once and Future City." SF the Magazine of Design and Style, May 1990.
Douglas, Patrick. "Business vs. Pleasure in Yerba Buena Center." New West 4, no. 4, February
1979.
Duncan, Michael. "China's New Urbanity." Urban Land 67, no. 7, July 2008.
Evitts, Elizabeth A. "Three Proposals for San Francisco's Transbay Neighborhood." Architect
96, no. 10, September 2007.
"Future Talk, 13 Distinguished American Architects Share Their Visions of Tomorrow's
Cities." Mainliner Magazine, March 1979.
Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape. New York: Museum of Modern Art,
2005. Included Knowledge and Innovation Community Master Plan, Shanghai, China.
Heller, Alfred. "The California Tomorrow Plan, Revised Edition." Cry California 7, no. 3,
Summer 1972.
Lou, Ellen. "The Transbay Plan." Urban Land 63, no. 5, May 2004.
Parman, John. "Saigon South: Asia’s New City on the Water." Aquapolis, 1997.
Rapaport, Richard. "Architect of a New Vietnam." California Business Magazine, May 1994.
Rapaport, Richard. "Designing a New Asia." San Francisco Focus, November 1996.
"Rapid Growth Predicted as Doors Open to Foreign Investment." Architectural Record, July
1994.
Shafroth, Morrison. "The Shape of Things to Come – Mission Bay." San Francisco Business
Magazine 27, no. 6, June 1992.
258

Shay, James and Christopher Irion. "Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP." In New
Architecture San Francisco. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1989.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP: Architecture and Urbanism 1995-2000, edited by Andy Whyte.
Mulgrave, Australia: Images Publishing Group, 2000.
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill: Selected and Current Works, edited by Stephen Dobney. Victoria,
Australia: Images Publishing Co., 1995.
Tucker, Sharon. "Learn by Looking." LINE, News that Connects [San Francisco AIA], Fall
1992.
Watters, Ethan. "The Future of the City." SF [San Francisco] Magazine, February 1992.
259

JOHN LUND KRIKEN
Born: July 5, 1938, Berkeley, California
Education: University of California Berkeley, Bachelor of Architecture, 1961
Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Master of
Architecture in Urban Design, 1968
Work Experience: Allison B. Peery Architect, San Antonio, Texas, 1964-67
Boston Redevelopment Agency, 1969
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco, 1970-present
Associate, 1972
Associate Partner, 1974
Partner, 1984
Consulting Partner, 2004-present
Teaching Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri
Experience: Rice University, Houston, Texas
University of California Berkeley, College of Environmental
Design, adjunct professor, 2004-present
Professional Registered architect, California
Registration: National Council of Architectural Registration Boards
Certification, New York, New Jersey
Professional American Institute of Certified Planners
Associations: American Planning Association
Lambda Alpha International, Golden State Chapter
Service: American Institute of Architecture, Juror, National Awards
Program
American Society of Landscape Architects, Juror, National
Awards Program
Bay Conservation and Development Commission Design Review
Board, Chair, 1991-present
Harvard Graduate School of Design, Alumni Advisory Council
Progressive Architecture, Juror, National Awards Program
San Francisco Art Commission
University of California Berkeley, College of Environmental
Design, Chair of Dean's Advisory Council
Military Service: U.S. Army, 1961-63
Selected Awards Fellow, American Institute of Architects, 1987
and Honors: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, San Francisco Office,
Firm of the Year Award, AIA, California Council, 1988
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP, National Firm Award, AIA,
1996
260

Beijing Finance Street, Beijing, China
Urban Design Award, AIA, California Council, 2008
Best Planning Project, Architectural Record/Business
Week, 2008
Award for Excellence: Asia Pacific Competition, Urban
Land Institute, 2008
Award for Excellence: Global, Urban Land Institute, 2008
Foshan Lingnan Tiandi Master Plan, Foshan, China
National Honor Award for Regional and Urban
Design, AIA, 2009
Hollywood Revitalization Plan, Hollywood, California
Community Planning Award, American Institute of Planners
Hong Kong Waterfront Master Plan, Hong Kong, China
National Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design,
AIA, 2000
Saigon South Master Plan, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Urban Design Award, Progressive Architecture, 1995
National Honor Award for Urban Design, AIA, 1997
San Antonio River Corridor Study, San Antonio, Texas
Special Mention, U.S. Department of Housing & Urban
Development, 1974
Urban Design Award, Progressive Architecture, 1974
Shanghai Luwan Taipingqiao Area Specific Plan, Shanghai, China
Award for Excellence: Asia Pacific Competitions, Urban Land
Institute, 2003
Silicon Valley Financial Center, Master Plan, San Jose, California
Urban Design Award, Progressive Architecture, 1985
Transbay Design for Development, San Francisco, California
Analysis, Research and Planning Category: Merit Award,
American Society of Landscape Architects, Northern
California Chapter, 2008
Award, American Planning Association, California Chapter,
Northern Section, 2005
Urban Design Award, AIA, San Francisco Chapter, 2004
Treasure Island Master Plan, San Francisco, California
National Honor Award for Regional and Urban Design,
AIA, 2009
Urban Design Award, AIA, California Council, 2008
University of California Merced Master Plan, Merced, California
Special Citation, SCUP/AIA, CAE, 2006
Yanbu Industrial City Master Plan Yanbu (Jeddah Area), Saudi
Arabia
Urban Design Award, Progressive Architecture, 1981
261

Adams, Chris 80, 82
Alexander, Chris (Christopher) 124-125
Arcosanti, Arizona 118, 156
Ardalan, Nader 90-91, 194
Ashby, Gordon 34, 69-70
Bandar Shapur, Iran 90
Bassett, Edward Charles (Chuck) 250
Brasilia, Brazil 231-232
Bunshaft, Gordon 250
INDEX OF NAMES AND BUILDINGS
California Tomorrow Plan (project and publication) 46-48, 76-81, 84-86, 219-220
Center Cities Transportation project 44, 71-72, 84
Childs, David 73-74, 139, 151
De Stefano, James 91
Doane, Larry 103, 135
Dubai, United Arab Emirates 143, 145
Enquist, Phillip 93, 133, 137, 218, 238, 249, 255
Gehry, Frank O. 113
Goldberg, Jerry 46, 79-80, 82, 97, 101, 248, 255
Goldstein, Marc 76, 79-80, 82, 87, 97-98, 112-113, 194, 255
Graham, Bruce 152. 248, 250
Halprin, Lawrence (Larry) 113
Hartman, Craig 239, 255
HemisFair World Fair 1968, San Antonio, Texas 33, 41, 54, 60-61, 69-70
Hewlett-Packard 235-237
Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), Vietnam 225-230
Hollywood, California, Plan 112
Hong Kong, China 117-119, 122, 155-156
Indian projects 191-193
Iranian projects 90-92, 111, 122-123, 194-195
Jin Mao Tower, Shanghai, China 193-194
Kallman, Roger 133
Khan, Fazlur R. 249
Knowledge and Innovation City, China 188-189
Koolhaus, Rem 142-144
Kriken, Anne Girard (first wife) 40-41
Kriken, John Eric Nord (father) 1 -2
Kriken, Katherine Koelsch (second wife) 160-161, 255
Kriken, Ragnhild Marit Lund (mother) 1-3
Kriken, Rolf Nord (brother) 7
262

Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) 189-190, 201-203
Merrill, John O., Jr. 91, 97
Montgomery, Roger 67-69
Moore, Kathrin 83, 230, 255
National Land Use Policy 45-46, 84-86
Niemeyer, Oscar 231
Olsen, Don 13-14, 38
Owings, Nathaniel A. (Nat) 73-74, 76-77, 79, 150, 224
Peery, Allison 31-32, 53
Saigon South, Vietnam 226-228
St. Helena, California, Plan 89-90
San Antonio River Corridor Study, San Antonio, Texas 59-61, 86-88, 171
San Antonio, Texas 30-36, 54-57
San Francisco, California 125-128, 152-155, 161-168, 196-197
San Francisco International Airport, International Terminal 239-240
São Paulo, Brazil 230-233
Shanghai, China 119-121, 193-194
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) 70-76, 82-83, 91-92, 95-115, 129-152, 169-175, 208-215,
244-251, 255
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Chicago 248-249
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Los Angeles 111
Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, San Francisco 75, 102, 105, 110, 114, 135-136, 151, 250
State Street, Chicago, Illinois 238-239
Taipingqiao, Shanghai, China 174, 181, 186
Tianjin Economic-Technological Development Area (TEDA), China 233-235
Transbay Transit Center, San Francisco, California 57-59, 147-150
University City, Vietnam 228-229
University of California Berkeley 202, 217-218, 241
University of California Berkeley, Bancroft Library 202, 217-218
University of California Merced 58, 75-76, 197-201, 204-207, 216-217
University of California Santa Cruz 206-208
van der Ryn, Sim 36-38, 109
Wampler, Jan 41
Washington, DC 73-74, 223-224
Woo, Carolina 172, 185, 239, 255
Xin Tian Di District, Shanghai, China 181-186
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