Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment

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9:00 am - 5:00 pm Monday to Friday, Eric Arthur Gallery.

The exhibition “Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment” will run until July 6, 2013.

“Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment” celebrates the work of the Pritzker Prize-winning principal of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates (KRJDA), whose many famed projects include the Ford Foundation Building (1963–66), the Oakland Museum in California (1961–69), and the Union Carbide World Corporate Headquarters (1978-82) in Danbury.

The subtitle of the exhibition, “Architecture as Environment,” reflects Roche’s understanding of architecture as a part of a larger context, both human-made and natural, including symbolic systems and technological networks. For example, Roche’s Ford Foundation Building in Manhattan contains a 12-story plant-filled atrium, which was heralded as a great innovation when the building opened in 1966.

Roche's career spans more than half a century and two continents. He was trained at University College Dublin in his native Ireland during the early 1940s, and at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), where he studied with Mies van der Rohe in the late 1940s. Roche is also a former design associate of Eero Saarinen.

In addition to the Pritzker Prize, which he received in 1982, Roche was the recipient of the Gold Medal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990, and the AIA Gold Medal in 1993.

Curated by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

ASSA ABLOY is the lead sponsor of "Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment." Additional support for the exhibition is provided by The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Carolyn Brody, Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, and an anonymous donor.

Organized by the Yale School of Architecture.

A detailed essay on Roche's work and a review of the exhibit originally displayed at the Yale School of Architecture in 2011 was published in Places Journal. Read the full article here.