Architect Kevin Roche died on March 1. Best known for his expansion of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the American architect of Irish origin won the 1982 Pritzker Prize and the 1993 AIA Gold Medal. In 2017 director Mark Noonan made a documentary film about him called “The Quiet Architect”.
Mark Noonan’s 2017 documentary The Quiet Architect focused on the life and work of architect Kevin Roche, whom the director called an “enigma”. With good reason: in 2017, the year the documentary was filmed, at the age of 95 Kevin Roche still continued to work on his architecture, despite a long career and a list of important prizes that included the 1982 Pritzker Prize and the 1993 AIA Gold Medal, and despite having built more than 200 buildings in the United States, Europe and Asia and created green buildings before the public began to demand them, before they “came into fashion”. The architect continued to look forward to the future, demonstrating little interest in fame and avoiding the label of archistar, staying true to the teachings he left the world in his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech. The words the Roche family used on March 3 in announcing his death on the pages of the Roche Dinkeloo web site were: " We should, all of us, bend our will to create a civilization in which we can live at peace with nature and each other. To build well is an act of peace. Let us hope that it will not be in vain".
Architect Eamonn Kevin Roche was born on June 14 1922 in Dublin, Ireland. After graduating from the School of Architecture at University College Dublin in 1940, he worked for Michael Scott in Dublin and Maxwell Fry in London. In 1948 he moved to the United States to complete his post-graduate studies at Illinois Institute of Technology with a great master of architecture, Mies van der Rohe. He started working in Eero Saarinen’s Detroit studio in 1950. After the architect’s premature death in 1961, he and his colleagues John Dinkeloo and Joseph Lacy completed the twelve projects the architect had been working on, including the TWA-Terminal at JFK International Airport in New York, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis (Missouri), Dulles International Airport Terminal in Washington, and more. In 1966 he founded what is now KRJDA (Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates) in Connecticut with engineer John Dinkeloo (who died in 1981), winner of the AIA Firm Award, the most important award presented by the American Institute of Architects to an architectural firm.
In his documentary, Mark Noonan attempts to represent Kevin Roche’s buildings in cinematographic style to offer people who have not been able to visit them an opportunity to immerse themselves in these constructions, their spectacular size and their beauty. The architect’s best-known projects include, in addition to the revolutionary Oakland Museum of California, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, known as The Met, one of the biggest and most important museums in the United States, a project which is truly unique, also in view of the long-term partnership that resulted with the client. Kevin Roche worked on The Met for fully 45 years, from the 1967 masterplan requiring a complete overhaul of the existing building to subsequent expansions and the installation design for new collections acquired by the museum over the years. Other important works in New York include Central Park Zoo, 60 Wall Street, the Ford Foundation, the United Nations Plaza and the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Memorial to the Holocaust. The architect’s works in Europe include business campuses for Bouygues in Paris and Banco Santander in Madrid.
(Agnese Bifulco)
KRJDA - Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates: www.krjda.com
