Kevin Roche
Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
1982 

Kevin Roche, the 1982 recipient of the international Pritzker Architecture Prize, is no stranger to awards and praise. With good reason, since the body of work accomplished by him, and with his partner of 20 years, John Dinkeloo, who died in 1981, is truly of epic proportion. 

One of his early honors was the California Governor's Award for Excellence in Design; a similar award came from New York State. There have been honorary degrees — one in 1977 from the National University of Ireland where he had completed his Bachelor of Architecture in 1945, and another from Wesleyan University last year. The American Institute of Architects bestowed their Architectural Firm Award in 1974. Earlier, the New York Chapter gave him the 1968 Medal of Honor. In 1976, the American Society of Designers presented him with their Total Design Award. The French Academie d'Architecture presented him with their Grand Gold Medal in 1977, and elected him a member in 1979. There have been, and undoubtedly will be, many more. 

Roche was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1922; he emigrated to the United States in 1948 and became a citizen in 1964. When he came to America, it was originally to be the beginning of a ten year world tour, each year working with a different architect. The first stop was enrolling in a graduate course at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where Mies van der Rohe taught. The latter was, and still is, one of Roche's idols along with Eero Saarinen and Alvar Aalto. 

It was when his funds ran out that he managed to find a job with Mr. Saarinen's firm in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. His future partner, John Dinkeloo, joined the same company almost at the same time in 1951. From 1954 until Mr. Saarinen's death in 1961, Roche was his principal associate in design. 

When Mr. Saarinen died, Roche and Dinkeloo completed the ten major projects underway, including the St. Louis Arch, the TWA Terminal at JFK International Airport in New York, Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., Deere and Company Headquarters in Moline, Illinois, and the CBS Headquarters in New York. 

Roche's first design after Mr. Saarinen's death was the Oakland Museum. The city was planning a monumental building to house natural history, technology and art. Roche gave them a unique concept, a building that is a series of low level concrete structures covering a four block area, on three levels, the terrace of each level forming the roof of the one below — a museum (actually three museums) with a park on its roof. This kind of innovative solution became Roche's trademark. 

In Contemporary Architects, C. Ray Smith wrote that Roche "demonstrates a kind of problem solving for each specific situation that has produced works of distinct individuality and stylistic variety from project to project." And further, he called Roche and Dinkeloo, "The most aesthetically daring and innovative American firm of architects now working in the realm of governmental, educational and corporate clients." 

Roche firmly believes that architecture should not fall into a rigid mold. There have been a number of attempts to label or categorize his work — all of which he rejects. 

Speaking of his recent corporate headquarters for General Foods, in Rye, New York, Roche says, "It is not post-modern or premodern. It is simply the most obvious thing I could have done. It is an important center of economic activity. The design began with a need, and it addresses the problem of accommodating office workers in a suitable environment. I think the public will identify with it." 

C. Douglas Dillon, Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has several important new wings and additions designed by the Roche-Dinkeloo firm, said in an interview published in the AIA Journal, "They did a great design that is perfect for art. They were not out for the enshrinement of their own very real genius." 

One of Roche's most acclaimed designs is the Ford Foundation in New York City. The structure is of glass, rust-colored steel and warm brown granite providing offices around a spacious 12 story atrium. 

In all, Roche has been responsible for some 51 major projects over the past twenty years. Paul Goldberger, New York Times architecture critic, in an article that appeared in Travel & Leisure, described Roche as "one of the most creative designers in glass that the 20th century has produced," and "a brilliantly innovative designer; his work manages to be inventive without ever falling into the trap of excessive theatricality." 

Some ten years earlier, Wolf von Eckardt, writing for Horizon magazine, said of Roche and Dinkeloo, "They are leading architecture out of its stylistic and futuristic preoccupations to the far more urgent, more immediate, task of making the city of our time more livable and attractive." 

Go Back to the Top of this Page

---

Citation from the Pritzker Jury 

In this mercurial age, when our fashions swing overnight from the severe to the ornate, from contempt for the past to nostalgia for imagined times that never were, Kevin Roche's formidable body of work sometimes intersects fashion, sometimes lags fashion, and more often makes fashion. 

He is no easy man to describe: an innovator who does not worship innovation for itself, a professional unconcerned with trends, a quiet humble man who conceives and executes great works, a generous man of strictest standards for his own work. 

In this award to Kevin Roche we recognize and honor an architect who persists in being an individual, and has for all of us, through his work and his person, made a difference for the better. 

Go Back to the Top of this Page

---

On Architecture 

by J. Carter Brown 

Address at the Presentation Ceremony

Architecture. Why does it fascinate us so, and why is quality in it so elusive? 

We supposedly are in control of what we build, and yet what we build takes us over. We walk around it, through it, it dominates our peripheral vision, our feeling of space and volume, our ultimate sense of well-being or lack of it. To experience it involves the dimension of time. Its very scale prohibits us from ignoring it. No other art form can compete on these terms. Pictures, sculpture, even earthworks, certainly no musical composition or piece of poetry or drama played out on stage, screen or tube, can command the sheer presence nor the sense of weightiness and weightlcssness that architecture provides. 

Folk buildings, architecture without architects, can often qualify to the highest levels of our built inheritance. Yet everything around us that gives us shelter and therefore security had to be designed by someone. 

But so much of what we see is mediocre at best. Why is the art of architecture so difficult? 

The basic explanation lies in the number of masters that architecture must serve. The poet at his writing table, the painter at his easel has before him an almost limitless freedom. The architect, however, has a client, be it individual or collective. There are constraints, not only financial, but in program, use, and in the very engineering fiber of what will or will not stand and withstand forces bent on sooner or later destroying it. 

Constraints can often help. As Chairman of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, reviewing architectural proposals month after month, I have often watched designs improve as the result of budgetary stringency. Sometimes one can only wish that Vitruvius could have had his way, when he proposed a neat system of fining the architect in proportion to cost overruns. Sometimes, however, the client is better served the other way. The values of the society are what make the ultimate decisions. Philip Johnson likes to point to what must have been the percentage of the gross national product of the city-state of Athens that was allocated to the design of the Parthenon. In the renaissance, when Bernardo Rossellino was commissioned by Pope Pius II to design the town of Pienza and spend 18,000 ducats, the bill came in at 55,000. Whereat the enlightened pontiffremarked, "Now that I have seen it, it is worth all that and more." 

Constraints are not just money. There is a sinew of realism in architecture. The engineering must work; the heating and ventilating in an increasingly energyconscious world must come out right; people and things must get in and out and move through it commodiously; it must work for emergencies; it must work often as part of the larger fabric of urban design in which it stands. 

Theophile Gauthier once wrote: L'art sort plus bel d'un forem au travail rebel, " or, roughly, "Art comes out more beautiful if from a refractory medium." 

In a period when the romantic vision of the artist in his garret still haunts us with the drama of the persecuted avant garde, the architect of our own day has to work more in the framework of the great old master painters and sculptors and composers who had missions to fulfill and clients to please. The resulting constraints often unleash creativity by freeing the artist, paradoxically, from the paralysis of unlimited choice. 

Contraints need not preclude diversity. At this moment, the variety of architectural expression around the world is healthily profuse. Ultimately, it is not the style that matters, but the quality with which that style is practiced. We are lucky today to have so much ferment in the world of architectural thought. But mere faddishness is no boon to standards. 

The world deserves more architecture of the quality recognized by the Pritzker prize. The hope of all of us concerned with the prize is that, by example, a raising of the standards will come about, on the part both of the architects, and of the clients, whose constraints and opportunities can help make great and inspiring architecture happen. 

Go Back to the Top of this Page

---

Kevin Roche's Acceptance Speech 

First is the act of thanksgiving: 

To the Pritzker family for its extraordinary foresight and generosity in establishing this prize, and for its intention to "stimulate creativity and contribute to a deeper sensitivity" to the environment. 

To Carleton Smith whose energy and imagination brought this prize into being and who sustains it with an extraordinary intensity of commitment. 

To those who have the need to build, who select the services of architects and make architecture possible in the first place. To be a good client requires a great deal of patience, courage and stamina. 

To those who write about architecture, both those who have been supportive and those who have been critical. Your voice is always heard. 

To those fine architects who have constituted our office over the years and who are responsible for much of what is being honored here tonight. 

To John Dinkeloo, dear friend for thirty years, without whose strength and skill and many talents this work would never have happened. 

To Eero Saarinen whose short life described for many of us the full dimension and the true role of an architect and whose memory will be honored by the generous gift which accompanies this prize. 

And finally, to this great free community, the United States, and those other free communities which make it possible for us all to live and work in freedom in a world where the concept of individual freedom is given much lip service but where it exists as a reality only in a few fortunate places. 

Now, notoriety brings with it a certain amount of fan mail and there has been much attending this event. It is stimulating, uplifting and rewarding to receive such approbation. Let me read you a random sample so that you may share my pleasure. 

This letter comes from a lady in Las Vegas, New Mexico. She is one of those people who likes to get to the heart of the matter in her opening paragraph— 

"I think the members of the Pritzker Committee must be out of their minds—to honor, in the year 1982, an architect who is designing in glass and masonry/steel. Such energy wasters are dated, old, dull and boring. Yes, I read all that hot air about `sensual public space' and `exploring elegant works'—etc., etc. And what is still more maddening to one who 

loves her country and art—is that this prize will affect the teaching at architectural schools and so promote more such moribund designs." 

All this came in a large envelope across which was boldly handlettered the question—"What have you done today to prevent a nuclear war?" 

Well, I was a little taken back by that. I didn't feel I had done anything to prevent a nuclear war that day. 

But such is our human nature that I immediately began to justify my actions. 

Is not the act of building an act of faith in the future and an act of hope? 

Hope that the testimony of our civilization will be passed on to others? 

Hope that what we are doing is not only sane and useful and beautiful, but a clear and true reflection of our own aspirations. 

And hope that it is an art which will communicate with the future and touch those generations as we ourselves have been touched and moved by the past. 

That Architecture is an art we have the evidence of history; that it is an art in our time we cannot yet judge. 

We can only desire to make it so. 

It is presumptuous of us to will Architecture into being an art without fully understanding its nature, and dangerous to speak so much about art lest we confuse it with fashion. 

Art comes hard. It is the conclusion of profound thought on the nature of things rather than on acceptability and acclaim. 

It is so easy to forget that we build buildings for people—people who must see them and people who must use them. 

It is so easy to forget that those people are individuals with a variety of needs and tastes and it is hard to remember that they are not just numbers. 

We should accept the responsibility to create our environment and use the opportunity we have to lead and educate society into improving its habitat, and let other times judge what was art and what was fancy. 

Let other times measure our civilization. 

We should, all of us, bend our will to create a civilization in which we can live at peace with nature and each other. 

To build well is an act of peace. 

Let us hope that it will not be in vain.