Creating the Unexpected

By Wolf Von Eckardt

Kevin Roche walks off with architecture's biggest prize

One of Architect Kevin Roche's most delightful buildings does not look like a building at all. It is California's Oakland Museum, which is tucked under a lush terraced garden. Roche's United Nations Plaza Hotel and office tower in Manhattan, on the other hand, is an icy glass sculpture of almost overbearing assertiveness. His Power Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Michigan, with its innovative stage, codesigned by the late Jo Mielziner, seems as enchanting as the Petit Trianon in Versailles. His 23-story Knights of Columbus headquarters, suspended between four massive columns, which guards the freeway exit from New Haven, Conn., has rightly been called paramilitary.

The shapes and techniques of Roche's architecture are as diverse as the purposes his structures serve and the surroundings for which he designed them.

Consistent only in its consistent surprises, his work cannot be recognized by any personal style other than its marvelous competence and attention to detail. Roche, 59, seems above the style wars raging in the world of architecture. That lofty stance may be one reason why last week he won that world's highest honor: the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

The award, a tax-free $100,000 and a small Henry Moore bronze abstract titled Ode to Architecture, is donated by the Hyatt Foundation; the recipient is annually chosen by a distinguished jury for "significant contribution to humanity and the environment." The first winner, in 1979, was Philip Johnson, 75, who is both the indisputable doyen and the enfant terrible of contemporary architecture. Johnson was followed by the Mexican minimalist Luis Barragan, 80, and, last year, the British postmodernist James Stirling, 56.

Roche heads one of the most successful U.S. architectural firms, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates (Dinkeloo died last summer). Among the firm's acclaimed buildings are the Ford Foundation headquarters in New York City, the new buildings of Deere & Co. in Moline, 111., and the additions to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, including the Temple of Dendur Pavilion, the Michael C. Rockefeller Primitive Art Wing and the Robert Lehman Pavilion. New corporate headquarters for Union Carbide Corp., General Foods Corp. and Conoco Inc. are nearing completion. Early this month plans were announced for redesigning New York's Central Park Zoo.

Roche, lanky, Dublin-born and taciturn, shrugs off all discussion of style, let alone postmodernism. A spreading architectural fashion, postmodernism seeks to reconnect functional glass-box modern with historic architecture. Says Roche: "I don't see history as an issue. I never lost sight of it. At a time when most American architecture students were taught to disdain the lessons of the past, I had to draw acanthus leaves and the classic columns. Back in Dublin, we got rigid, old-fashioned Ecole des Beaux-Arts training."

In 1948, after working for various architects in Ireland and England, Roche decided to study under Glass-Box Master Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. After a year, Roche began bumming around the U.S. His not-so-taciturn fellow Irishman, Yale Art Historian Vincent Scully, contends that this was the time when Roche "was bowled over by the bigness and power of American industrial architecture."

The most decisive influence on him at the time was Eero Saarinen, son of the eminent Finnish-American architect Eliel Saarinen. The young Saarinen had just opened his independent practice in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and Roche and Dinkeloo, an architect who was a genius at structural engineering, joined the firm at about the same time.

Saarinen's firm created the Kresge Auditorium and the Chapel at M.I.T., St.

Louis' Gateway Arch, the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport and the majestic Dulles International Airport terminal. Each building was different and exciting. Each was "to explore and expand the horizons of our architecture," said Saarinen.

In 1961, at the age of 51, Saarinen suddenly died just as his growing firm was moving into a Teutonic mansion in Hamden, Conn. Roche and Dinkeloo took over the business and kept the Saarinen promise. "What Saarinen taught us," says Roche, who became an American citizen in 1964, "is not to find a new mold or formula for producing architecture like so many automobiles, but to design each building with a fresh enthusiasm for meeting its specific requirements."

On the four-block site he was given in Oakland, Roche saw a much greater need for a small park than for a big museum building. He designed the complex as a walled garden with large, welcoming entrances. The roof of one gallery becomes the terrace of another. The colorful gardens, with their reflecting pool, sculpture and pergola, have become a meeting spot. They give Oakland a sense of place.

The requirement of the Ford Foundation headquarters, as Roche saw it, was to overcome the institutional confines of the modern office, with its angst-inducing anonymity. Roche's solution was to group the offices around an inner court, which Critic Ada Louise Huxtable has called "a horticultural spectacular and probably one of the most romantic environments ever devised by corporate man." Across this court, office workers are aware of one another. It inspires a sense of being a working family.

A similar concern for improving working conditions rather than the corporate image inspired the design for the Union Carbide headquarters building in Danbury, Conn., now nearing completion. Virtually all offices are of the same size. Even junior executives can choose from 15 basic office styles.

While few critics dispute Roche Dinkeloo's technical ingenuity and aesthetic daring, some charge the firm with a bent for a dehumanizing bigness. Some of its glassy towers--the Worcester (Mass.) County National Bank, for instance--loom large indeed. But while many big new buildings, in the name of progress, merely take, Roche's buildings give--pleasant plazas or little parks and improved working conditions. Union Carbide's complex is only four stories high. Conoco, near Houston, consists of three-story buildings clustered around an artificial lake. General Foods, in Rye, N.Y., in harmony with surrounding residential buildings, is seven stories high.

Said Roche wryly as he received the prestigious Pritzker prize: "There are many fine architects around who are more deserving of this than I. Who they are, I cannot think of at this moment." He will use the money to endow an Eero Saarinen Chair of Architecture at Yale University. --By Wolf Von Eckardt

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