WHILE NOT A HOUSEHOLD NAME, HIS DESIGNS ARE KNOWN WORLDWIDE. KEVIN ROCHE BECAME AN ARCHITECT OF CHOICE FOR THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART. HE DIED LAST WEEK AT AGE 96.
Built major institutions amid postwar boom
Kevin Roche, a Pritzker-winning architect who emerged as one of corporate America’s leading designers during the postwar boom years and became an architect of choice for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and other major institutions, died March 1 at his home in Guilford, Connecticut. He was 96.
His son Eamon Roche confirmed the death but did not provide a specific cause.
The Irish-born Roche moved to the United States in 1948 and became a protege of Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect known for designing sculptural, futuristic buildings. For nearly a decade, he was Saarinen’s principal design associate, absorbing his expressionistic style and his philosophy that architecture should serve a higher purpose by bringing people together and helping to build a sense of community.
After Saarinen’s death in 1961, Roche and colleague John Dinkeloo spent years overseeing the completion of their employer’s unfinished work, including Dulles International Airport near Washington, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the T.W.A. terminal at Kennedy International Airport in New York. They then went into business as Roche-Dinkeloo, keeping the name after Dinkeloo died in 1981. Their guiding principle was the reimagining of giant work spaces and museums, trying to make them more appealing to the toiling or visiting masses.
In 1965, Roche completed his first major commission: designing a home for the new Oakland Museum of California. He and Dinkeloo conceived of a plan for a threetiered building that was stacked like a set of stairs, with each level opening up to gently sloping terraces, lawns, and trellis-clad walkways. Viewed from above, the museum itself disappears and only the geometric gardens are visible.
In 1968, Mr. Roche unveiled his design for the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York. Twelve stories of glass-walled offices look out over treetops and a lush conservatory — an indoor garden oasis in midtown Manhattan that to this day remains open to the public.
Though soaring, plantfilled atriums would eventually become a cliché, introducing a burst of greenery to a declining New York City felt bold and uncommonly generous at the time. New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable deemed the building a “splendid, shimmering Crystal Palace” and a gift to the entire city.
After creating a master plan for New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1967, he spent four decades adding on new galleries, including a glass pavilion, reminiscent of an Egyptian pyramid, that houses the Temple of Dendur.
Hired by banks, insurance companies and manufacturers, including General Foods and Union Carbide, Roche designed vast, light-filled workplaces that inspired comparisons to spaceships and came equipped with amenities such as fitness studios and hair salons.
Detractors of Roche’s style contended that some of the monumental buildings he designed could feel forbidding and unwelcoming because of their vast scale and blunt geometry.
The New Haven Coliseum in Connecticut, a hulking arena completed in 1972 as part of an ambitious urban-renewal scheme, was criticized for being built to a scale better suited to the monster trucks that occasionally faced off inside the stadium than to the humans in the surrounding community. In 2007, the city demolished the concrete-and-steel structure, a job that required more than one ton of dynamite.
As the architect for the Knights of Columbus international headquarters in New Haven, which he finished in 1969, Roche took inspiration from towering grain silos. He even used silo tiles to decorate the four concrete cylinders placed at each corner of the 23-storey glass tower that dwarfs almost everything in the vicinity.
Though his work is generally associated with late modernism, Roche steadfastly refused to be categorized or labelled throughout his six-decade career. In 1982, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, considered the profession’s equivalent to the Nobel Prize. “Kevin Roche’s formidable body of work sometimes intersects fashion, sometimes lags fashion, and more often makes fashion,” the jury noted in their citation.
Eamonn Kevin Roche was born in Dublin and grew up in Mitchelstown, in County Cork. His father was a cheesemaker who gave him his first commission as a teenager: designing a piggery for the family’s farm. Roche went on to attend University College Dublin, which had Ireland’s only architectural school at the time.