He began his studies at the School of Architecture at University College Dublin in 1940 and completed the five-year program in 1945. During his student years he designed several projects for the Mitchelstown Creameries. There, he says, “Nobody had ever heard of an architect.” But his father, a successful farmer, asked Roche to design a pigsty, which he did. “The pigs loved it,” he recalls. After graduation, Roche worked for Michael Scott in Dublin and Maxwell Fry in London.
He was one more in a series of profiles of immigrants who have made important contributions to the fields of architecture and design, in his country of adoption outside his country of birth.
José Juan Barba
"It would be impossible to write a history of 20th-century architecture without Kevin Roche,"
Robert A.M. Stern in the 2017 film Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect.
After moving USA from his native Ireland in 1948, Roche continue postgraduate studies with Mies van der Rohe, another significant European emigré, at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Shortly after completing graduate studies, Roche’s career took off in the 1950s. During his sixty-nine year career in the USA, worked alongside seminal architects Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen and Associates, and on projects for such heavyweight clients as the Federal Reserve, MIT, Ford, Deutsche Bank and IBM.
When Saarinen died in 1961, the firm was passed into Roche’s hands, where it became Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates LLC. Roche finished a handful of Saarinen’s most well-known projects, including the Gateway Arch, CBS Headquarters and the TWA Flight Center at JFK, and then went on to design numerous institutional and corporate headquarters, museums, and educational facilities worldwide. He has served as the architect for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Master Plan for over forty years, overseeing its expansion and installations. And in the midst of all of this, Roche’s work garnered a Pritzker Prize (1982), the AIA’s Gold Medal (1993), and the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990), among other awards and accolades.
I felt the responsibility of the modern architect is to create a community for a democratic society.
Kevin Roche explains at one point in Mark Noonan’s documentary film Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect.
Roche was a unique voice in modern architecture for his ability to advocate for abstracted forms that nonetheless tied thoughtfully into their environments. Of special significance was his design for the Ford Foundation building, which the historian David Gissen described as "a significant project in the history of environmental design for its ability to marry the image of botanical conservation with burgeoning practices in worker productivity, allowing the building to receive generous funding in its production of a building hybrid."
He has received many honorary awards from universities including the National University of Ireland and was granted a Doctor of Fine Arts from Yale University. He has served on the boards of numerous cultural institutions and was the past president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other honors, he was awarded the Academie d'Architecture Grand Gold Medal in 1977, the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1982 and the Gold Medal for Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990. In 1993 he received another of architecture's highest honors, the American Institute of Architects' Gold Medal.
He was practicing until at age 96. He dies March 1st, 2019, at his home in Guilford, Connecticut, aged 96.
