An Irishman always tips his hat when leaving a room.

While his handiwork graces the skylines of most major metropolitan areas, we were fortunate enough to see the fruits of his imagination here on ours more than most.



Eamon Kevin Roche died on March 1st having bitten off the better part of ninety-six years and, least of his many many achievements, lighting a fire under a good portion of my architectural curiosity.

Perhaps the word to best describe his oeuvre? Unpredictable. His expertise spanned any number of styles. And he used his command of that breadth to constantly surprise one of the most diverse portfolios of clients in architectural history. He was loved by corporate heads, museums, hoteliers, and the private sector with equal enthusiasm. He seemed far more interested in how each project could fully manifest given the particular coordinates it would inhabit than any commitment to an architectural movement. In his characteristic humility the internationally known 'starchitect' described himself as a problem-solver in construction, "I think about where you're going to hang your coat."

But he never lacked for style. He sat high up as its arbiter. When Eero Saarinen died, Roche finished what would become the last word in 60s chic, the landmarked and soon-to-open-as-hotel TWA Terminal 5 at JFK. 

Out of the starting gate on his own in the firm he founded with John Dinkeloo (1918-1981) he gave us a glass and concrete terrarium of a building, a California forest dropped down on 42nd for the Ford Foundation. It is so unexpected, so strikingly gorgeous a structure I couldn’t find that one picture, so pictured: Three to even slightly convey its actual presence.

The soft-spoken Dublin-born New Yorker quashed any notion of ego when he stepped out of his due spotlight and subtly built a new home for one of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s most storied and sought-out residents, the Temple of Dendur. His simple yet distinctly Egyptian angles frame the masterpiece, and the miles of glass do less to call attention to itself than they do flood the room with a Nile-like sunlight, glorious part of the day, somber others.

He became a kind of architect-in-residence at The Met and other than Calvert Vaux and Richard Morris Hunt, it is his imprimatur that defines our experience of the space. His other work in the vast expansion of The Met during a full four decades in the late 20th Century carves out spaces of quiet contemplation, courtyards and conduits that give us context, the time needed to organize all the art racing around our heads. 

His Millennium Tower across the street from the United Nations looked one block to the north (one block to the right in the photo), saw the angled doorway on the diminutive building, and turned that small embellishment into some kind of colossal gesture. It too lacks ego, but is a statement of a tower nonetheless, and one that suggests all buildings be good neighbors, nodding to the least of those on the block.











By the way, its surprising external geometry surprises on the interiors with equal drama. Though I always wonder if guests bang their skulls in there.

I have to admit I do not like his 60 Wall Street. A classic column blown up to postmodern proportions, it is busy and bulky, banded and random in the way I find much of postmodernism to look in the rear view mirror. And its tactile yet scaly forest of interior columns feels alien and slightly disturbing. Worse, perforated and lacy-looking as the columns are are, they don't evoke the strength one might want in such a supporting role. 

But don't go by me.

I once loathed his 750 Seventh Avenue, often dubbed the mobile phone building for its columnar rooftop antenna. It was an early entry into the revitalization of Times Square and I felt it missed the mark. After the 1911 Equitable Building stole more than its share of the sky on its downtown neighborhood, zoning laws have focused on volume of a building with respect to its footprint. Should a building want height, as 750 did, typically setbacks were required to keep volume in check and the sun shining down into the caverns of Manhattan. Roche hoped to give his setbacks some dynamism by placing them in a graduating helix up the building. I remain confused why this is such an utter failure in execution. Ironically, it feels unusually static for a building that aimed for the opposite outcome. But its ceramic black and grey glazing I once found lumpy and ominous? I couldn't love it more these days for the way it conjures the 80s so specifically, a specifically fun epoch in my life whose aesthetics I never appreciated in their moment. 750 Seventh  stands there all goth in Gotham. Well done!

And his success at the Jewish Heritage Museum alone would have put any other lesser architect on the map of greatness. A six-sided six-story pyramid of a hexagon, it intentionally calls to mind the underestimated six million Jews killed in the Holocaust. It stands protected by a bulwark of a building that highlights the astounding array of Jewish achievement after their near obliteration as a people just sixty years ago. 

And finally, rising on the Manhattan skyline at the much ballyhooed Hudson Yards is number 55.  The nearly finished 55 Hudson Yards' finishing touches may, in fact, beat this blog to publication. I didn't know it was Mr. Roche's design when I saw it up close first about four months ago. Coincidentally, I had just snapped a photo of 165 Mercer Street, a cast iron bit of splendor that went up in SoHo in 1870 and blogged about just the other day ( Then, now in SoHo.) 

55 Hudson Yards went through several iterations. But it landed on the one that despite all the changes, opened early, despite all its blue glass glossy neighbors went a bit gray and matte, and despite all the forward-looking designs it stands among, references its history in an all-out unabashed love letter, the last it would turn out, from Mr. Roche to all his predecessors,  to architecture. 

Kevin Roche said goodbye with a building that Louis Sullivan himself would have designed. It elicits all the rows of warehouse windows each framed individually, in SoHo and Sullivan's Chicago in iron, here in steel. It resembles a skyscraper that might have been born had technology advanced to this point but the 140 years of intervening architecture hadn't. 

The texture is so sensual, completely comforting, retro to the 1870s but, too I keep thinking, like the television sets we spent so many comforting hours in front of but whose shape no longer populates our homes. Only an artist of supreme confidence and maturity would be capable of this kind of genuflection. Roche's talent allowed for his twist. He goes meta on us, and where the frames open up in larger windows, he doubles and quadruples the frames. It's a window of a window on to architecture, these windows that inhabit the skin of his utterly satisfying bit of artistry. 

So we say good-bye to Kevin Roche only because we must. It is sad we will get no more from him. But by tipping his hat to the past in gratitude, he tosses a gauntlet forward that dares the next generations: Match me if you can. And I'll be comforted by the monuments to him sprinkled all over Manhattan by virtue of his stylish Irish eyes.