Kevin Eamon Roch died on March 1, 2019 in Guildford, Connecticut. In total, over 200 of his projects have been implemented in different countries of the world during his 60-year independent career. In 1982, Kevin Roch received the Pritzker Prize, in 1993 - the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
Kevin Roch was born in 1922 in Dublin to an Irish political activist who later became a successful entrepreneur. It was his father who became Roch's first customer, when he was still studying at the Faculty of Architecture at University College Dublin: these were various agricultural buildings, for example, a pigsty for a thousand pigs. Then Kevin Roch worked with Maxwell Fry in London, in 1948 he studied with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology, in 1949 he joined the project team of the UN headquarters in New York, and when he was reduced in 1950 after the completion of this project, got a job in the workshop of Ero Saarinen, where he soon took the position of his first deputy for design.
When Saarinen suddenly died at the height of demand in 1961, Kevin Roch was the one who completed his key projects - including the TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport in New York. His first object was the building of the Oakland Museum in California (1961-1969): a complex inscribed in the landscape for several museums of various profiles received gardens on roof-terraces. Roch has also spent nearly half a century renovating and expanding the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, including the famous ancient Egyptian temple hall from Dendur.
His most famous buildings, however, were commissioned by corporate customers - a variety of office parks, skyscrapers, city headquarters, for which he offered innovative formal and "social" solutions, taking care of the convenience of the team. Probably Roch's most famous work in this genre is the building for the Ford Foundation (1963–1967) in Manhattan, with a huge landscaped atrium that creates a comfortable environment for employees.
From 1961 until his death, Roche's bureau was called Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates: John Dinkelu was his colleague in the Saarinen bureau, then a partner and co-author, and the name did not change after his death in 1981.
