Design: Creating the Unexpected

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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."