KEVIN ROCHE (1922–2019)
Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kevin Roche, who designed more than two hundred buildings over the course of his career—including the three-tiered Oakland Museum of California, famous for its terraced roof, which serves as a park, and the twelve-story headquarters of the Ford Foundation in Manhattan, which was built around an indoor conservatory—died at his home in Guilford, Connecticut, on March 1. He was ninety-six years old.
Born Eamonn Kevin Roche in Dublin, Ireland, on June 14, 1922, Roche began studying architecture at the University College Dublin in 1940. He completed a five-year program at its School of Architecture in 1945, before landing one of his first jobs with British architect Maxwell Fry. Roche moved to the United States three years later for his postgraduate work at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he intended to work with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but he only stayed one semester.
In 1949, Roche joined the United Nations Headquarters Planning Office, where he worked on realizing the Harrison & Abramovitz–designed complex in the Turtle Bay neighborhood of Manhattan. The following year, he relocated to Detroit to work for the office of architect Eero Saarinen, known for his futurist designs, and in 1954, he became Saarinen’s principal design associate. When Saarinen died in 1961, Roche helped found Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates with partners John Dinkeloo and Joseph Lacy; the firm’s first commission was the Oakland Museum of California.
Roche would go on to work on eight museums, thirty-eight corporate headquarters, seven research laboratories, and performing arts centers and theaters for six universities. He developed a master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967 and added the Sackler Wing for the Temple of Dendur to the north; the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing, with the Andre Meyer Galleries above, to the south; and the New American Wing and Wallace Galleries over the next four decades.
In New York, Roche also designed the Central Park Zoo, 60 Wall Street—the fifty-one-story tower and home of J.P. Morgan Bank that was made to look like a classical column—and the Museum of Jewish Heritage, a six-sided structure with a six-tiered, louvered roof reminiscent of the Star of David. Among the other projects led by the architect were the Knights of Columbus’s international headquarters in New Haven, Connecticut; Station Place, the 1.6-million-square-foot complex in Washington, DC, that houses the Securities and Exchange Commission; a headquarters of a comparable size for Banco Santander in Madrid, which comprises ten interlaced buildings; and the Convention Centre in Dublin.
Roche’s work has been showcased in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in 1968 and 1979 and at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990. In 1982, he won the Pritzker Prize for his “formidable body of work,” which, the jury said, “sometimes intersects fashion, sometimes lags fashion, and more often makes fashion.” In 1993, Roche received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, and in 2017, his life was chronicled in Mark Noonan’s documentary Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect.
Commenting on Roche’s life work, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, an associate professor of architecture at Yale University and the editor of Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment (Yale University Press, 2011), told the Washington Post: “Kevin was an architect who made bold speculations, and oftentimes they came with a big risk, or a big reward. Sometimes they worked and became classics, and sometimes they backfired. So I think the verdict is still out, but there’s no question that he belongs among the most successful, and most significant, architects of the twentieth century.”
