KEVIN Roche's first commission as an aspiring young architect was a piggery for his father Eamon in Mitchelstown, Co Cork.
A letter writer to The Irish Times told the story that when asked his opinion of the job, he is said to have remarked: "Well, I never heard a single complaint from any of the tenants.”
By the time of his death aged 96, Roche had designed major buildings for museums, corporations and airports around the world and been recognised with the profession's highest honours.
Many were in the US where he lived most his life. However, he also won acclaim in Ireland for the Convention Centre on Dublin's quayside - the world's first such carbon neutral centre and a symbol of the city's affluence and confidence.
Roche was born in 1992 in Dublin, the son of prominent republican Eamon Roche who moved his family to Mitchelstown and became general manager of the town's creamery, establishing the Galtee cheese brand.
He studied architecture at UCD and worked in Dublin and London before moving to the US in 1948, working on the United Nations headquarters in New York and with Finnish architect Eero Saarinen in Detroit, before founding the firm Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates.
Over six decades his work would include eight museums, 38 institutional and corporate headquarters, research laboratories, theatres and university campuses.
They included the Ford Foundation headquarters with its atrium garden in Manhattan, the Oakland Museum of California with its terraced roof as a public park, and the skyscraper headquarters of the JP Morgan Bank on Wall Street, New York.
He also designed the headquarters of Unicef, the Central Park Zoo and worked for many years to expand the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In 1982 Roche was awarded his profession's highest honour, the Pritzker Prize.
Mourning the passing of a "modest and compassionate man", his family recalled his final remarks in his acceptance speech: “We should, all of us, bend our will to create a civilization in which we can live at peace with nature and each other. To build well is an act of peace. Let us hope that it will not be in vain.”
Kevin Roche died on March 1. He is survived by his wife of 55 years, Jane, and five children.
