On Kevin Roche, and the Architecture of Possibility

Architizer News

On Kevin Roche, and the Architecture of Possibility

October 18, 2011

“The good news is that most modern buildings will fall down,” architect Kevin Roche told Nicolai Ouroussoff last night at the Ford Foundation. It’s ironic, to say the least, that many of Roche’s own buildings will certainly not be falling down any time soon, unless by implosion–the untimely fate that befelled the New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, just one great building in a long list of the architect’s masterworks. Roche, the architectural visionary whose radical structures in concrete, glass, and steel influenced a generation of architects, and Ouroussoff, the former architectural critic for the Times, were on hand to celebrate the opening of the Yale School of Architecture-curated exhibition Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment at the Museum of the City of New York, sponsored by ASSA ABLOY. Read on.

Ford Foundation, New York, 1963-68

Roche’s work occurred at a critical junction between modernism and postmodernism, and, more generally, at the acute historical moment when economic pressures and ecological instability provoked the rise of nostalgia for the comfort of pre-modern(ist) forms and environments. In New York, Robert Moses’s urban renewal projects–concrete monoliths, spiraling highway ramps, and LOMEX–had been defeated by the Jane Jacob’s small-scale urbanism, best characterized by Greenwhich Village. Ouroussoff likened the pair of rivals to the mother and father, with Roche’s work not just metaphorically but physically bridging the two–though Roche jested that he “tried to keep away from Jane Jacobs,” as best he could.

Last night’s talk at the Ford Foundation with Kevin Roche in conversation with Nicolai Ouroussoff.

This infrastructural engineering enabled Roche’s bold forms, which, through their sheer scale and bluntness, bravely confront civic and urban problems in ways few architects have achieved, now or since. Roche was able to do this, perhaps, because he had inherited a large and capable office from his mentor and employer Eero Saarinen, who, at the time of his death, left the former a dozen projects to finish.

From the beginning, Roche, with his partner John Dinkeloo, was designing large gestural megastructures–with all of the daring and some of the absurdity of Archigram’s or Cedric Price’s theoretical projects–that somehow managed to get built. The Ford Foundation, whose design Roche commenced in 1963, just two years after Saarinen’s death, was a veritable crystal palace, with a 140 foot high glass atrium and a menagerie of trees and plants, while the aforementioned Coliseum featured a giant four-story parking structure that abutted (and nearly dwarfed) a stadium complete with elevators and circulation running along the facade.

Air Force Museum, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio, 1964

Oakland Museum of California, 1968

Knights of Columbus Building, New Haven, 1969

New Haven Veterans Memorial Coliseum, 1972

Interesting were Roche’s display of and commentary about his original project slides and diagrams, which he presented to clients as a logical sequence of simple, notational architectural moves and consequences. Zoning envelopes would be maximized, massings extruded, and apertures created from sun angles. Yet, whereas these diagrammatic exercises of OMA and their progeny (BIG) lead to seemingly logical, if somewhat silly (or ironic…) designs, the strictures of Roche’s approach fall away the minute the finalized form is produced. Surely, what rational sequence of thought could lead to and also legitimize Roche’s ”solution” of hoisting an office tower 150-feet in the air so as to create a public park and preserve views at ground level?

Project for the Federal Reserve Bank, New York, 1969

Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1974

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lehman Pavilion, New York, 1975

It’s evident that the quality of Roche’s work declined as time passed (several office towers and industrial plants will go unmentioned), just as much work of the ’60s and 70s has fallen out of favor. But, Roche’s gifts and contributions are being rediscovered today by a new generation of architects and planners, who are eager to return to architecture its lost sense of servitude and possibility, at all scales of life.