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

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