Temko, Allan 1924–2006

OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born February 4, 1924, in New York, NY; died of congestive heart failure, January 25, 2006, in Orinda, CA. Critic, educator, and author. A longtime architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, Temko was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist whose critiques had an impact on many of the buildings in the Bay Area. He attended Columbia University, where he chanced to meet fellow student Jack Kerouac, who used Temko as the model for his character Roland Major in On the Road. Before completing his degree, America entered World War II, and Temko served in the U.S. Navy, seeing action in the Pacific Theater. After the war, he returned to school to complete his A.B. in 1947. For his graduate studies, Temko went to the University of Paris for several years, as well as the University of California at Berkeley. He then moved to France, where he lectured at the Sorbonne and the École des Arts et Metiers during the early 1950s. It was in Paris that he later said he gained an appreciation of architecture as art and as an expression of a civilized society. Returning to America in 1956, he was an assistant professor of journalism at the University of California at Berkeley until 1962, then a lecturer in city planning and social sciences there until 1970. Temko was also a professor of art at California State University, Hayward, during the 1970s, and a lecturer at Stanford from 1981 to 1982. He also guest lectured at such institutions as Princeton and Yale. It was his job as architecture critic at the Chronicle, however, that gained him the most attention. He took the job there in 1961, remaining in that role until he retired in 1993; he also served as art editor from 1979 to 1982. Temko was highly critical of some of the modern architecture that was changing San Francisco's skyline, and he also emphasized that buildings should not only be artistic but, when possible, environmentally friendly. Many of his comments were credited as having an influence on how some building plans were changed in San Francisco before they were built. When an earthquake there in 1989 destroyed many dilapidated buildings, he declared that it was a higher power that likely destroyed the worst structures there to make a statement. Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for his criticism work, Temko was the author of several books, including Notre-Dame of Paris (1955), Eero Saarinen (1962), and No Way to Build a Ballpark: And Other Irreverent Essays on Architecture (1993).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, January 27, 2006, section 3, p. 7.

Los Angeles Times, January 27, 2006, p. B11.

New York Times, January 27, 2006, p. A21.

Washington Post, January 29, 2006, p. C8.