Kevin Roche: A career in review

Now in his 90th year, Kevin Roche has never seemed more incandescently consequential than he does today. In the past three months, with the completion of an overhaul of both the American and the Islamic wings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Roche has lived to see the fulfillment of the master plan that he and his partner, John Dinkeloo, devised over 40 years ago, when the ebullient Thomas Hoving was still the museum’s director.

At the same time, Roche has been the subject of an admirably thorough exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery, “Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment,” which is now in its last days at the Museum of the City of New York. The exhibition, which will move on to two venues in Canada, coincides with a full-dress monograph on the architect that has the same title as the show.

It would be fair to say that Roche was — and remains — one of the major architects working in New York, in both the prominence and quantity of projects that he’s brought to fruition here over the past half-century.

That’s not to mention his many projects elsewhere.

Kevin Roche

In addition to the vast amount of work his firm has done at the Met, it has also been responsible for the Central Park Zoo, the Ford Foundation Building at 321 East 42nd Street, the Museum of Jewish Heritage and the United Nations Plaza among others.

One of the first winners of the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1982, Roche’s legacy remains ambiguous: He is famous today for the architecture he designed three or four decades ago, even though the buildings he’s designed in more recent years is — depending upon one’s aesthetic inclinations — better, if also more derivative.

Though he speaks American English with hardly a trace of an accent, Roche is an Irishman who arrived in the States just after the end of World War II. Roche moved to Chicago to study with the undisputed, and seemingly infallible, pope of international modernism, Mies van der Rohe.

But Roche did not remain long with the master, whom he soon came to find too constricting. In due course he joined forces with one of the most gifted international modernists, Finnish-born Eero Saarinen, whose practice he continued when, in 1961, that architect died of a brain tumor at age 51.

Given that architecture has been, in the past century, largely an old man’s game, Roche achieved success very early. He was just 40 when his firm, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, or KRJDA, got the commission to design its masterpiece, the Ford Foundation Building, a brutalist cube near the East River. What is so striking about the 20-story building is that the interior was hollowed out to form a massive indoor garden.

Conceived during the true “Mad Men” age, this building seems to incarnate the spirit of those times — the age of the corporation man. More even than Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, KRJDA was, architecturally, the spearhead of this movement.

In a 1967 lecture, Roche made the astounding claim that if architecture is “to truly succeed, it has to be the size of our government’s aerospace program.” In those few words he summed up, better and more pointedly than any parody, the ethos of the early ’60s.

Systems theory, with its relentless grids and its arid theories, ruled the day, and no one expressed its ambitions in purer form than Roche. Whereas his colleague Saarinen was a moody poet of evocative forms, Roche seemed to wish to expunge the human spirit from his pure forms.

We see this in some of his earlier work at the Met, no less than at the Ford Foundation and at United Nations Plaza.

It was in this spirit, unfortunately, that Roche undertook, starting in 1967, to manage the expansion of the Met. One would be hard-pressed to conceive of an aesthetic more doctrinally opposed to that of the museum’s preexisting Beaux Arts structures along Fifth Avenue than the weary, paltry glass grids that made up the surroundings of the Temple of Dendur.

In total, his expansion of the museum over the last four decades makes up several acres of thoroughly undistinguished architecture (seen both from the inside and the exterior) jutting into Central Park.

But sometime around 1990 a curious transformation came over Roche: He discovered contextualism and a lyrical historicism that were the very antithesis of the earlier style he remains associated with. Some of his projects, like the Museum of Jewish Heritage, are thoroughly unimaginative works in the new style. But others, starting with the overhaul of the Central Park Zoo in the 1980s, were decidedly more successful.

Perhaps his finest example in this latter style is the Met’s Petrie European Sculpture Court, a pink-and-pearl reenactment of Beaux Arts architecture, fashioned so convincingly from granite and marble that few visitors to the museum are apt to realize that it’s not from the turn of the last century.

Which brings us to Roche’s latest contributions to the museum — the American and Islamic wings, conceived in a historicist style as committed as was evident in the Petrie Court. Both are surely improvements over the previous incarnations of the galleries (which, by the way, were also designed by Roche’s firm).

Now the American Wing’s new galleries have been divided up into 25 spaces, totaling 30,000 square feet, designed in a Beaux Arts style that feels more open and inviting. It features high-coved ceilings, skylights and walls painted a warm and soothing gray, accented with granite and limestone.

If there is a conservative feel to those galleries, with a general consistency to the size and shape and style of the rooms, the Islamic galleries daringly integrate ancient architectural episodes into a very authentic-looking context.

One passes over alabaster floors to a qa’a, or reception room, built in Damascus in 1707. From there, one moves under an expansive 16th-century dropped ceiling of carved and gilded wood from Spain. Along the way, walls are covered with pierced windows of wood or stone known as jalis leading to a small central courtyard enlivened by a purling fountain, marble floors and walls arrayed in dazzlingly abstract patterns in terracotta.

As with Petrie Court, the space seems, for the most part, to be powerfully authentic. I could well have imagined it to be, were it not for the fact that some months ago, on a hard-hat tour, I saw with my own eyes a pair of artisans from the Middle East laboring to conjure up this vision in time for the opening.