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Allan B. Temko | |
|---|---|
| Born | Allan Bernard Temko (1924-02-04)February 4, 1924 |
| Died | January 25, 2006(2006-01-25) (aged 81) |
| Education | |
| Spouse | Becky (1950–1996, her death) |
| Children | 2 |
Allan Bernard Temko (February 4, 1924 – January 25, 2006) was an American architectural critic and writer based inSan Francisco. He won thePulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990.
Born in New York City and raised inWeehawken, New Jersey, Temko served as aU.S. Navy officer in World War II, graduated fromColumbia University in 1947, and continued his graduate studies at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, and at theSorbonne in Paris, France. He taught for several years in France and produced a landmark book about the Cathedral ofNotre Dame,Notre Dame of Paris, in 1955.[1] He wrote architectural criticism for theSan Francisco Chronicle from 1961 to 1993. He also taughtcity planning and the social sciences at theUniversity of California, Berkeley andCalifornia State University, Hayward (now California State University, East Bay).
Following Finnish-born architectEero Saarinen's death in 1961, Temko publishedEero Saarinen (1962), a critical examination of Saarinen's most famous works from theGeneral Motors Technical Center to theJefferson National Expansion Memorial and itsGateway Arch (still in the planning stages at the time), as a volume inGeorge Braziller'sMakers of Contemporary Architecture series.
Temko was an activist critic who defended the urban character and texture of San Francisco from, in his words, "a variety of villains: real estate sharks, the construction industry and its unions, venal politicians, bureaucrats, brutal highway engineers, the automobile lobby, and – in some ways worst of all – incompetent architects and invertebrate planners who were wrecking the Bay Area before our eyes." One of these villains, an architect namedSandy Walker, famously sued Temko over his 1978 description of Walker'sPier 39 project which began, "Corn. Kitsch. Schlock. Honky-tonk. Dreck. Schmaltz. Merde."[1]
Temko was instrumental in the removal of theEmbarcadero Freeway[2] and memorably described the 1971Vaillancourt Fountain on the Embarcadero as a thing "deposited by a concrete dog with square intestines."[1]
He described theCity Center Building inHayward in the early 1970s, calling it a "toaster", due to its slightly elongated rectangular shape, which strongly influenced public opinion of the building.
Temko, who metJack Kerouac when they were both undergraduates at Columbia, appears in Kerouac's novelOn the Road as the model for the character "Roland Major".[1] Temko also appeared in Kerouac'sBook of Dreams as Irving Minko and inVisions of Cody as Allen Minko.[3]
He called for an international design competition for theeastern span replacement of theSan Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, saying that both the single-tower cable-stayed scheme (favored byT.Y. Lin) and the single-masted self-anchored suspension design ultimately chosen were incapable of being "a world-famous work of engineering art."[4]
Temko was awarded thePulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990. He died of apparent congestive heart failure at the Orinda Convalescent Hospital inOrinda, California, in 2006.[1]
Pulitzer Prize for Criticism (1976–2000) | ||
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