Allan Temko

Allan Bernard Temko (February 4, 1924 – January 25, 2006) was an American architectural critic and writer based in San Francisco. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990.

History Born in New York City and raised in Weehawken, New Jersey, Temko served as a U.S. Navy officer in World War II, graduated from Columbia University in 1947, and continued his graduate studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the Sorbonne in Paris, France. He taught for several years in France and produced a landmark book about the Cathedral of Notre Dame, Notre Dame of Paris, in 1955. and memorably described the 1971 Vaillancourt Fountain on the Embarcadero as a thing "deposited by a concrete dog with square intestines."

He called for an international design competition for the eastern span replacement of the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, saying that both the single-tower cable-stayed scheme (favored by T.Y. Lin) and the single-masted self-anchored suspension design ultimately chosen were incapable of being "a world-famous work of engineering art."

Temko was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1990. He died of apparent congestive heart failure at the Orinda Convalescent Hospital in Orinda, California, in 2006.