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The Unstarry Architect

Kevin Roche: The Quiet Architect examines the remarkable life and achievements of an award-winning Irish-American known for his low-key modesty and singular vision. 

Mitchelstown-born Kevin Roche is feted across America for his people-friendly buildings which are both loved and acclaimed. His firm of Roche and Dinkeloo, founded in 1966, has for decades been the first choice for corporate and cultural America alike.

“The big corporations that understood quality in architecture all went to Kevin,” says the former boss of Cummins Engineering in Columbus, Indiana, who commissioned him with the design for a new headquarters. 

The 94-year-old Roche still works constantly in his office in Hamden, Connecticut and has only recently stopped going in on a Saturday, to the great relief of his wife Jane. 

Honour

Kevin Roche graduated from UCD in 1945 and has been at the top of his profession for more than sixty years in the US. In 1982, he was awarded the Pritzker Prize, the highest honour for a living architect.

He humorously recalls a UCD assignment which featured a spiral staircase and was dismissed by his tutor with the criticism that it would never fit a coffin.

His first Irish public project, the Convention Centre Dublin, opened in 2010, about ten years behind schedule and after a tortuous path through the Irish planning process. Roche describes its escalator motif as “a celebration of movement” and remarks that he sensed resentment in the reaction to it and had to field remarks that his design would “ruin Dublin”.

“The voice of the common man counts for a lot more in Ireland,” one of his staff comments in relation to the protracted gestation of the Convention Centre building. 

Roche’s first private Irish commission, however, was a piggery on the family farm in Mitchelstown. 

The pigs were very happy in it, he says. “They are a wonderful animal, to know and to eat.” 

Roche's architectural philosophy focuses on creating “a community for a modern society” and he is regarded as a pioneer of green buildings.

Roche has won awards for his designs of over 300 major buildings around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (which he has worked on for almost 50 years) the revolutionary Oakland Museum of California, the Ford Foundation and UN Plaza in Manhattan, the Centre for the Arts at the Wesleyan University, and corporate campuses for Bouygues in Paris and Banco Santander in Madrid.

In this documentary he quotes Sigmund Freud, who believed that access to nature is essential to sanity. He places the user at the centre of his buildings and in the documentary colleagues describe his lengthy interviews with hundreds of office workers who will work in his spaces, before he ever starts designing. 

Roche speaks of architecture as work that is a response “not only to the immediate requirements but also to the broader concerns of the community, the accommodation of the natural and cultural environment, and the belief that the final responsibility is not only to the user and the community, but ultimately to posterity." 

He disdains clients who don’t accept that buildings are for the common good and remarks that the bad clients are those who “haven’t really grown up yet”.

“Sometimes I wish I’d been a poet,” he muses. “It would have been so much easier because I wouldn’t have had clients.” 

Director Mark Noonan, himself a UCD architecture graduate, photographs the Roche buildings in a cinematic style that brings the spectacular nature of their size and beauty to the big screen. 

'Quietude'

Roche’s architectural peers speak with awe in the documentary of the “reassuring quietude” of his buildings and their confidence of spirit. 

“He is capable of paramilitary dandyism,” remarks Robert A.M. Stern, Dean of the Yale School of Architecture. 

But Roche himself remains measured and modest throughout

What is most striking in the documentary is Kevin Roche’s indefatigable work ethic combined with his forward-looking thinking. “If you don’t work, you can’t be sane,” he says. 

And his closing advice is look out for where you’re going, not for where you’ve been.