The Convention Centre on Spencer Dock, Dublin … the Irish project of the prize-winning, Dublin-born architect Kevin Roche (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Patrick Comerford
During my visits to Dublin, as I travel from Dublin Airport along the quays and the banks of the River Liffey into the city centre, the Convention Centre on Spencer Dock on the north side of the river still has the same captivating, breath-taking visual impact as it had when it first opened in 2010. Back then, it immediately became a striking landmark building in Dublin.
The Convention Centre was designed as part of a Public/Private Partnership between the Office of Public Works (OPW) and Treasury Holdings, headed by Johnny Ronan and Richard Barrett, and was the first state-owned, public-access building built since the foundation of the Irish State. It is also the first and only Irish project of the prize-winning, Dublin-born architect Kevin Roche (1922-2019) since he moved to the US in 1948.
The Convention Centre was designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kevin Roche and is known for its many architectural innovations, including the glass frontage and numerous curved walls. The stunning glass-fronted atrium has panoramic views of the River Liffey, Dublin city centre and across to the Wicklow Mountains, and was the first carbon-neutral convention in the world.
The building was first suggested as long back as 1987, although the proposal was not formalised until 1997. The building was completed in May 2010, four months ahead of schedule and on budget, and was opened by the then Taoiseach Brian Cowen on 7 September 2010.
The lasting influence of John Ruskin on Kevin Roche’s approach to architecture is reflected in an observation he once made: ‘Architecture is a local language and a universal language. Ultimately, a great building touches both, so that artist, and common man, understand it without being conscious of it. It is interwoven. That is great architecture.’
Kevin Roche was born in Dublin but was based in the US throughout most of his career. He is seen as one of the greatest architects of the 20th century. He was a member of an elite group of third generation modernist architects that included James Stirling, Jorn Utzon and Robert Venturi, and he is considered to be the most logical and systematic designer of the group. He and John Dinkeloo, his partner in the firm KRJDA, produced over a half-century ‘of matchless creativity.’
Roche designed more than 200 landmark and famous buildings, including museums, art centres, corporate headquarters, airport terminals and university buildings. His portfolio in the US included work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the UN Plaza in Manhattan, the Oaklands Museum in California and the Ford Foundation headquarters on East 42nd Street which, in 1968, became the first modern building to be laid out around a plant-filled atrium.
The Convention Centre Dublin … the architect Kevin Roche was born at 25 Lower Camden Street, Dublin (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
Kevin Roche was born Eamonn Kevin Roche at 25 Lower Camden Street, Dublin, above his aunt’s shop, on 14 June 1922. He was the youngest of three sons of Alice (Harding) Roche (1882-1963) from Soloheadbeg, Co Tipperary, and Eamon (Edmond) Roche (1884-1956), a creamery manager who was born in Bansha, Co Tipperary. They were married in Saint Joseph’s Church, Limerick, in 1913 and Kevin Roche was born between the War of Independence and the Irish Civil War.
Eamon Roche fought on the Republican side in the Civil War, and was jailed twice. Kevin Roche told The Irish Times in an interview in 2017 that he was born while his father was serving his second jail sentence. When Eamon Roche was released from jail, he moved with his family to Mitchelstown, Co Cork, returned to work as a creamery manager. He successfully brought together the surrounding dairy co-operatives, forming the largest co-op in the south-west and setting up the Galtee Cheese Company later bought out by KerryGold.
Kevin Roche went to school in Rockwell College, near Cashel, Co Tipperary, where his interest in architecture developed after reading John Ruskin’s The Seven Lamps of Architecture. He later recalled that the book ‘was not the easiest to read but was very interesting’. He then studied architecture at University College Dublin. After his first year in UCD, his father gave him his first commission –designing a piggery for Mitchelstown Creameries.
After graduating in 1945, he worked with the Dublin modernist architect Michael Scott on the designs for Busáras and Donnybrook bus garage (1945-1946). He then moved to London to work with Maxwell Fry in 1946, before moving to the US to study under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago (1948).
Excited by the building of the United Nations headquarters and the ‘idea that people would stop fighting one another’, he moved to New York in 1949 and worked in the planning office on the UN headquarters project.
He then moved to Detroit to work with the Finnish architect Eero Saarinen, who was then being recognised as one of the world’s leading architects. He was assigned to work on the General Motors Technical Centre, a sprawling campus of 24 modern buildings that became emblematic of corporate architecture of the early 1950s. While working for Saarinen, he met his future wife Jane Tuohy (1935-2020), from Lucas, Ohio. They were married in 1963 and became the parents five children.
When Eero Saarinen died suddenly in 1961, Kevin Roche and his colleagues John Dinkeloo and Joseph Lacy took over several unfinished projects, including the Gateway Arch in St Louis, Missouri; the TWA Flight Centre at JFK International Airport; Dulles International Airport in Washington DC; and the John Deere headquarters in Moline, Illinois. They founded Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, based in Hamden, Connecticut, in 1966.
John Dinkeloo died in 1981, and Kevin Roche then headed the office himself. A year later, in 1982, Roche became one of the first recipients of the Pritzker Prize, described as architecture’s equivalent to a Nobel Prize. At the award ceremony he said: ‘We should, all of us, bend our will to create a civilisation in which we can live at peace with nature and each other. To build well is an act of peace. Let us hope that will not be in vain.’ The €100,000 prize money was used to create a chair of architecture at Yale in memory of Eero Saarinen.
Following these awards, Roche’s practice went global, receiving commissions for buildings in Paris, Madrid, Singaporeand Tokyo. He completed his first and only Irish project, the Convention Centre Dublin, in 2010.
The Convention Centre Dublin was Kevin Roche’s first and only Irish project (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
As well as the Pritzker Prize in 1982, this awards included the Gold Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1990), the gold medal of the American Institute of Architects (1993), the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland Gandon medal for lifetime achievement, and the French Academie d’Architecture Grand Gold Medal. He was also a trustee of the American Academy in Rome, president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a member of the National Academy of Design and the US Commission of Fine Arts.
Although he reached the top of his profession, Roche had a self-deprecating manner, little interest in celebrity and eschewed the label ‘starchitect’. His mission was to create buildings for the people who used them and for the community who would live around them. He has been credited with creating green buildings long before they became part of the public consciousness.
While he loved strong, memorable forms, he saw architecture as a matter of problem-solving as much as shape-making. Reviewers of his work say he was most comfortable when sculpting modernist shapes in glass, masonry and steel filled with light and greenery.
He had no interest in retiring and continued to work until he was 95 in the offices of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates. He died at the age of 96 at his home in Guilford, Connecticut, on 1 March 2019. He was survived by his wife Jane four adult children and 15 grandchildren.
Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates or KRJDA continues as Roche Modern, where Roche’s son, Eamon, is currently the managing director. The firm which has been described as the ‘poster child architectural firm of corporate America’.
Kevin Roche’s work has been the subject of special exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Architectural Association of Ireland in Dublin, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, the Yale School of Architecture, the Museum of the City of New York, the Building Museum in Washington and the University of Toronto.
Meanwhile, during the Covid 19 restrictions, the Houses of the Oireachtas moved their location temporarily from Leinster House in Kildare Street in 2020 and met in the Convention Centre in June 2020. There Micheál Martin was elected Taoiseach in the Auditorium on 27 June 2020.
The Houses of the Oireachtas sat in the Convention Centre in June 2020 (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2024)
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