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

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.
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