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

Riess: That was in your first year?
Kriken: This was for the whole time I was there. So we worked in this wonderful
Cambridge house, and it was full of expertise in different subjects of urban
design and planning. People from MIT and the professors from GSD would
meet with us. So it really maxed out that experience in a way I never could
have imagined. And also, of course, it tipped me completely into the subject
that became my life’s work.
Riess: Was it a built thing ever?
Kriken: It was done for Housing and Urban Development. The site was located in
Riess: It’s a city?
suburban Massachusetts; I think the Lowell area. It was really done as a sort of
a prototypical study, to try to identify what would be the advantages,
monetarily, socially, in the use of time, in developing a way of living outside
major cities that would be walkable and denser than what the current pattern
was. Actually, see that drawing there, on the wall? That’s Jose Sert’s drawing of
my part of this city as we were developing it.
Kriken: It’s a city. It’s freestanding. It actually was at a highway intersection. It’s
housing, work, shopping, entertainment. It’s a mix of low- and mid-rise
buildings. After I joined Skidmore, I was given a new town to design. And
having gone through this project at the GSD armed me, in terms of the pieces
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