The gentleman who introduced architect Kevin Roche at the Museum of the City of New York earlier this week, where there’s an exhibit honoring his work, did so with a bang, like this: “Kevin Roche studied with Mies van der Rohe and worked with Eero Saarinen."  And Roche, who’s 90 years old and still runs his own office, ended the whole affair with a bang, like this: "I’ll retire when I die."  Roche is famous for the corporate office complexes he built around the world and for two prominent New York City projects, the headquarters for the Ford Foundation, and a four-decades-long renovation of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This exhibit is the first time I’ve looked closely at Roche’s work.  I’d always associated it with that generation of corporate postwar American architecture offices, including SOM and KPF, that churned out handsome, inoffensive office towers and campuses.  But much of Roche’s work has a distinctive granular, cellular quality.  It’s as if he’s building up immense structures from a basic, irreducible, spatial unit, incorporating eccentric rhythms that allow a complex organic order to take hold.  While the facades of his buildings have a moneyed gloss, their plans and sections often reveal faint, alluring asymmetries.  In old black-and-white photos Roche looks like a classic Mad Men-era Modernist, with pleated wool trousers, a skinny black tie, and crisp, white dress shirt folded back to the elbow.  In person he’s suitably charming.  But there’s real mystery in the deep structure of his architecture.  It recalls utopians like Buckminster Fuller and the Metabolists and, more indirectly, the work of contemporary, biologically-bent architects like Philippe Rahm and R&Sie(n).  There’s another creature-like force lurking within Roche’s buildings.