Kevin Roche

Discusses Roche's approach to architectural design and shows his plans for office buildings, skyscrapers, training centers, art museums, performing arts centers, banks, college buildings, and post offices

This is both a lavish and deeply respectful tribute to architect Roche (and his partner, John Dinkeloo) and a catalogue raisonne of his work to date. Venice architecture professor Dal Co's introduction acutely summarizes Roche's achievement and contends that Roche's starting point was not the work of Mies van der Rohe but the more intellectually inventive and eclectic buildings of Eero Saarinen. Wonderful examples of Roche's work are illustrated here: the mirror-plated, gracefully bumpy lines of the United Nations Plazas One and Two; the airy, well-integrated additions to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the honeycombed court of the Moudy Visual Arts and Communications Building. (Manhattan's Ford Foundation is another noteworthy Roche project.) Dal Co also includes an interview, in which Roche admits that as a youth he thought architecture was something by which "somehow the world could be saved."
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.