Allan Bernard Temko (February 4, 1924 – January 25, 2006) was an American architectural critic and writer based in San Francisco.
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.
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."
[3] 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.