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

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-
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