Fact File
Name: Kevin Roche Age: Nearly 77 Occupation: Architect Why in the news: Has just lodged a planning application for the biggest-ever urban development in Ireland Least likely to say: I prefer bungalows, actually.
Kevin Roche knows how to sell ideas, often really big ideas. Now in his mid-70s, he has been described by Sam Stephenson as "one of the greatest living architects", with a body of work which is so breathtaking in its range that you can hardly believe he was born in Dublin and grew up in Mitchelstown, Co Cork, the son of a creamery manager.
Yet to meet him and chat amiably over dinner, as I did last December, it's hard to credit that this "absolutely charming, incredibly modest and completely unaffected" man, as Sam describes him, has made such a profound impact on 20th-century architecture not just in the United States, where he has been based for 50 years, but in many parts of the world.
He is, for example, the father of the modern atrium, now one of the most used and even overused forms in contemporary architecture, as John Graby, director of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland, noted yesterday. Roche introduced it in the Ford Foundation in New York 30 years ago, and it has since spread everywhere, starting with Hyatt Regency hotels.
Graby also recalls how he once "mesmerised" 200 Irish architects for three hours at an RIAI conference in Killarney, just talking about his projects. "He took us through his design for the Union Carbide headquarters, where he tried to create a humane working environment even to the extent of selecting plants that would give off a nice scent as the staff were going to lunch".
Yet, incredibly, Roche became an architect by accident. He came up to UCD to study agricultural science and, one day, happened to wander into an architectural lecture; immediately, as he himself recalls, he was "bitten by the bug". Later, he worked with Michael Scott on such projects as Busaras and the Donnybrook bus garage before leaving in 1948 to study in Chicago.
His professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology was the legendary Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, one of the fathers of the Modern Movement.
Perhaps inevitably, he stayed on in the US instead of returning to the depression-ridden Ireland of the early 1950s and landed a good job with Eero Saarinen, the Finnish-American architect who designed the Gateway Arch in St Louis.
After Saarinen's untimely death in 1961, Roche and John Dinkeloo, a Dutch-born structural engineer, "sort of inherited his office" and completed such projects as the marvellous TWA terminal at Kennedy Airport. But they really began to make their mark in the 1960s with the Ford Foundation on €42nd Street and the Oakland Museum, a terraced "non-building" in California.
Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates has since been associated with such huge projects as the headquarters of General Foods in Rye, New York, and numerous other prestige office buildings for corporate America. Dinkeloo died in 1980.
Current work, as Roche reels it off, includes a large project in Tokyo of three million square feet, with the government of Singapore as the client; research facilities and offices for Lucent Technologies in Chicago, Denver and Allentown, Pennsylvania, as well as Nuremberg, in Germany, and a 1,000-room student residence and separate student centre for New York University.
"We're just finishing a building of one million square feet in Kuala Lumpur, literally in the shadow of the Petronas towers, as well as an office development of about 4.5 million square feet in Singapore," Roche said from his office in Hamden, Connecticut. "We've got another large phase going on at the Metropolitan Museum [in New York], the reinstallation of its Greek and Roman galleries."
The firm, which employs only 65 architects, is also working on a major student recreational facility for MIT in Boston, which will include a "state-of-the-art" swimming pool; another million square feet of offices for Total Systems in Columbus, Georgia, and a headquarters building in Istanbul for a Turkish pharmaceutical company.
For the past three months he has been concentrating on Dublin. After an adverse reaction to earlier plans for the National Conference Centre site at Spencer Dock, his firm has now come up with a revised scheme which he hopes will pass muster with the planners, after they have finished poring over the 2,400 drawings submitted to Dublin Corporation earlier this week.
Kevin Roche did not set out to design the biggest urban complex ever proposed in Ireland. He was commissioned by Treasury Holdings primarily to design the conference centre; it is largely due to the fact that the Government refuses to pay for it or to subsidise its running costs that more than five million square feet of ancillary development is apparently required to support it.
The scale of what is proposed is staggering; equivalent, indeed, to everything that's been built so far at Canary Wharf in London's docklands. In Roche's latest plan, the 32nd version of the scheme for Spencer Dock, the overall height has been substantially reduced so that the tallest office towers won't be so visible from key locations, such as the "Georgian Mile" along Fitzwilliam Street.
Has his first-ever commission in Ireland not been a bit of a trial? "It's normal for a large planning scheme such as this where there are bound to be many concerns. But I feel that our latest master plan really responds to what we've heard in our discussions with the corporation and I'm hoping that it can become a collaborative effort between us, the developers and the city authorities."
Asked why he had never built in the State previously, Roche said he just hadn't been invited to do so until Johnny Ronan, one of the directors of Treasury Holdings, offered him the Spencer Dock commission. He is also "really astonished" at how things have changed in Ireland and "very excited about it", saying he believed the new economic base was built on solid piles rather than shifting sand.
As for the issue of high buildings in Dublin, he said Liberty Hall was "wrong from the word go" because of its impact on the city centre; if so, the same might be true of the high-rise scheme for George's Quay, opposite the Custom House, by international architects Skidmore Owings and Merrill. By comparison, Spencer Dock was "on the outskirts" and he thought Dublin could take it.
Laden with awards, Roche met President Clinton in late 1997 to discuss designing the Clinton Library in Little Rock, Arkansas, but that project now seems to be "on hold" for some reason. He has no intention of retiring even though he will be 77 in June. "Boots out the front door is the way I'll go. Anyone in the creative world doesn't retire. You simply can't retire. Why would you give up so much fun?"