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

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
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