Kevin Roche

Born: June 14, 1922 Dublin, Ireland
Died: March 1, 2019 (aged 96) Guilford, Connecticut, U.S.
Nationality: Irish American
Alma mater: University College Dublin
Illinois Institute of Technology
Occupation: Architect
Awards:
AIA Gold Medal
Twenty-five Year Award
American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medals
Pritzker Prize
Practice: Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates
Buildings:
Convention Centre Dublin
Head Office for Bouygues
Shiodome City Centre
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Museum of Jewish Heritage
1101 New York Avenue
Ford Foundation
John Deere World Headquarters
Metropolitan Museum of Art Oakland
Museum of California
Career:
1945: Roche attended Rockwell College and graduated from University College Dublin.
1945 to 1946: Worked with Michael Scott.
1946: Worked with Maxwell Fry in London.
1947: Applied for graduate studies at Harvard, Yale, and the Illinois Institute of Technology and was accepted at all three institutions,
1948: Left Ireland to study under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology.
1949: Worked at the planning office for the United Nations Headquarters building in New York City.
1950: Joined the firm of Eero Saarinen and Associates. His future partner, John Dinkeloo (1918-1991), joined the firm in 1951 and this was also where Roche met his wife Jane.
1954: Became the Principal Design Associate to Saarinen and assisted him on all projects from that time until Saarinen's death in September 1961.
1966: Roche and Dinkeloo formed Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates and completed Saarinen's projects.
1982: Kevin Roche became recipients of the Pritzker Prize. Following this accolade, Roche's practice went global, receiving commissions for buildings in Paris, Madrid, Singapore, and Tokyo.
2010: He completed his first and only Irish project, ‘The Convention Centre Dublin’.
March 1, 2019: Roche died at his home in Guilford, Connecticut, aged 96.
Design philosophy:
“In this mercurial age, when our fashions swing overnight from the severe to the ornate, from contempt for the past to nostalgia for imagined times that never were, Kevin Roche’s formidable body of work sometimes intersects fashion, sometimes lags fashion, and more often makes fashion.”
Pritzker Jury Citation
Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment
With his bold form-making and confidence in tackling problems on an urban scale, Roche stands out as a visionary among the late modernists.
‘Roche represents the great flourishing of American corporate architecture in the decades after the Second World War.’
‘Roche’s attention to complexly worked-out interiors conceivably resulted in object buildings isolated from traditional urban contexts.’
Notable works:
Pritzker Prize [1982]
American Institute of Architects - AIA Gold Medal [1993]
American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medals - Gold Medal Award for Architecture [1990]
Academie d'Architecture - Grand Gold Medal
Total Design Award, American Society of Interior Designers
Medal of Honour, New York Chapter of the AIA
American Institute of Architects Twenty-five Year Award
Classical America's Arthur Ross Award
Brendan Gill Prize of the Municipal Art Society of New York
R. S. Reynolds Memorial Award
New York State Award
California Governor's Award for Excellence in Design
Albert S. Bard First Honour Awards, City Club of New York
Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in Architecture
Brunner Award of the American Institute of Art and Letters
New York Chapter American Institute of Architects Award
The work of Kevin Roche has been the subject of special exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Architectural Association of Ireland in Dublin, and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
A 2012 exhibition, ‘Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment’, opened at the Yale School of Architecture in New Haven, Connecticut, and has been viewed at The Museum of the City of New York, the Building Museum in Washington, and the University of Toronto.
Film: A feature documentary called Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect was released in 2017. It was directed by Irish filmmaker (and former architecture student) Mark Noonan.
Quotes:
“Art comes hard. It is the conclusion of profound thought on the nature of things rather than on acceptability and acclaim. It is so easy to forget that we build buildings for people-people who must see them and people who must use them. It is so easy to forget that those people are individuals with a variety of needs and tastes and it is hard to remember that they are not just numbers.”
‘On occasion, there’s a big gesture, and that’s OK. But I’m basically a problem-solving construction guy.’
‘That Architecture is an art we have the evidence of history; that it is an art in our time we cannot yet judge. We can only desire to make it so.’