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

and some people from San Antonio. The first thing [that] impressed me about
Harvard was the difference in students between Berkeley and the GSD
[Graduate School of Design].
Riess: Oh yes. And how would you characterize that?
Kriken: At the GSD, all the students were very talented, but the most distinguishing
quality was their ambition. At Berkeley, you would probably say the range of
talent was wider. I mean there were probably a few people at Berkeley who
were out-of-this-world talented, and some who weren’t as talented. It was just
more mixed. The GSD seems to have screened out any possibility of variant
from very ambitious, very competitive, and very strong people. And they
seemed to be more prepared for practice than I felt.
Riess: You had been in practice, in a way.
Kriken: Yeah. They just seemed more confident than I was. Moving to Boston, I could
sense there were cultural differences. Actually, one of the most interesting
things about living in the Boston area was the difficulty people had in having
casual friendships. They really had trouble with it. You could be at a grocery
store and you see the checker, and say, “Hi. Nice day,” or something like that.
And I would see their face freeze, and look around, and maybe they should call
the police or something. Because that kind of exchange was not normal.
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