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

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
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