EERI’s Oral History Program has published the fifth volume in the Interviews by Stanley Scott series, focusing on John C. Kariotis (1927-2013).
The Interviews by Stanley Scott: An EERI Oral History Collection preserves and shares the valuable unfinished work of Stanley Scott (1921-2002), a research political scientist at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Beginning in 1984, Scott conducted tape-recorded interviews with pioneers in the field of earthquake engineering, eventually gathering hundreds of hours of audio and thousands of pages of transcripts. Scott completed nine volumes in Connections: The EERI Oral History Series, and the EERI Oral History committee completed another eight volumes posthumously using Scott’s draft manuscripts, notes, and interview transcripts. This new series makes available interviews that Scott was unable to finalize and publish during his lifetime.
John Kariotis spent his early years on a cattle ranch in the Missouri River Badlands of Montana with a K-8 education in a one-room school. After 14 months in the US Navy, he earned his BS in Civil Engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 1949 and began his career with an emphasis on seismic design. He was a partner in several Pasadena structural design firms that analyzed and designed innovative structures and construction systems. His interest in seismic code development grew into research on seismic performance of unreinforced masonry buildings, which included dynamic testing of components such as diaphragms and walls through the Agbabian, Barnes, and Kariotis (ABK) Joint Venture that was foundational to the development of new assessment methods, retrofit techniques, and guidelines for existing unreinforced masonry buildings. As a participant in the Technical Coordinating Committee for Masonry Research (TCCMAR), he played a key role in the development of limit-state design standards for masonry buildings in seismic zones.
Download the PDF of John C. Kariotis from the EERI Digital Library here.
