Eamon Roche
Managing Director, Roche Modern
Age: 55
Industry experience: 30 years
As the son of Kevin Roche, the renowned modernist architect, Eamon Roche witnessed the single-minded focus and “enormous sacrifice” that was needed to design and oversee iconic projects such as the Ford Foundation building in Manhattan and the Oakland Museum of California. The elder Roche’s firm, Hamden-based Roche-Dinkeloo, was formed to continue the work of legendary architect and designer Eero Saarinen following his death, and was responsible for designs such as Wesleyan University’s Center for the Arts and the former Union Carbide headquarters, now known as The Summit at Danbury. Eamon Roche pursued his own careers in building and development until his father asked him to join the firm in 2018 as part of a succession plan. Following Kevin Roche’s death in 2019, Eamon took over leadership of the firm, relocated its offices to New Haven and relaunched this year under the Roche Modern name.
Q: What was the impetus for the firm’s move from Hamden to New Haven in 2019?
A: For 50 years, the firm had been housed in a 20,000-square-foot mansion overlooking Lake Whitney, and that was actually a building that Eero Saarinen had [expanded]. It was a very large occupancy to maintain. It also occurred to me that the firm needed to be in a new space. Originally, the firm was divided into production upstairs and design downstairs. In recent times, everyone wanted to be in the same general environment on one floor. We moved into a wonderful industrial space in a nice concrete building at 319 Peck St. The new location puts us closer to Yale and the school of architecture, things we desire to be close to and [which] allows us to grow. We added a fabricating facility and are building out the new space.
Q: Which of your father’s projects do you consider the most influential?
A: I can’t get away from the Ford Foundation as being such an important building. That’s widely cited as his singular masterpiece. It’s undergoing a significant renovation by Gensler, who are very sensitive about that building.
Q: How did he influence your own career?
A: I was the eldest of five and generally speaking, none of us were encouraged to join him at the firm. He actually once told me it was an enormous sacrifice to be an architect at the level he performed at, and he just feared for that. He knew what it cost. He traveled a lot and it was a fierce commitment, so I think in that sense, he was sort of protecting us from this life which is wonderful and immersive, but it does come with a cost. We grew up around architecture and it was our life as children too. If we weren’t seeing him in his office, the fellow designers would come over on Sunday and have big communal dinners. I worked construction on the side during college and kept working and traveled around the country, and moved to New York City and started doing contracting work. Then I did some development work for others and myself. I was not in the field of architecture, but I like to say I was sitting at the same table.
Q: Why was 2018 the right time to join the firm?
A: It hadn’t been my intention. I kept a respectful distance from my father’s firm. We’d talk business from time to time, but eventually toward the end of my father’s life, he reached out to me, and he needed me in his office to mind the store, as it were. I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was looking at his own mortality and wanted to ensure that his clients and employees were going to be taken care of after he passed. At the time, the firm was completing a large project in Washington, D.C., Capitol Crossing, and I was able to come on board and be the continuum between his stewardship of the firm and the project completion which happened after he passed.
Q: What’s your impression of the current ownership’s repositioning of one of Roche-Dinkaloo’s buildings, the former Union Carbide headquarters currently known as The Summit at Danbury?
A: I think it’s great. It’s interesting how a building like that, which was so rigorously programmed for a specific use, still has in the hands of a good developer a lot of vitality and future uses. Clearly mixed-use is the wave of the future. The project and buildings languished for decades, so I’m thrilled to see the huge leases like Nuvance Health. This is in a state where that isn’t always easy to do.
Q: What are discussions with clients like about incorporating modernist designs?
A: It’s still part of this firm and many others’ of starting incrementally with the programming, and working very carefully but quickly into the complexities. It’s a process that my father was clearly a master of: really growing the building from the clients’ needs in often unexpected ways. We’re sometimes astounded to see how a project progresses over a period of a week. In terms of aesthetics, if modernism becomes just another style, it isn’t modernism. It’s a way of approaching a project.
Q: Is the current emphasis on integrating nature into office and residential buildings with features like living walls and vegetated roof terraces a vindication of modernist principles?
A: I look at my father’s career and putting the landscaping on the roofs and outside the building. He was so far ahead of his time in doing that. Now it’s de rigueur, but at the time it was a radical solution. In making those gestures, we have to make sure we’re making them not because we have to sell a building, but because they make sense. As much as I like the widespread adoption of these principals, I’m encouraged to see people pushing past them. It’s a tremendous time to be an architect now. On a monthly basis if you go to New York, it’s a joy to see all of the building going on and all the great architecture that’s going on.
Q: What is Roche Modern’s current specialty and growth strategy?
A: We have such experience in the museum and academic worlds. We love that kind of work. We’ve done a tremendous amount of work for developers, but we are full-service architects and we’re there from the first phone call to the punchlist. We’re not a “tower an hour” firm. You’re getting a tremendous depth of experience and wonderful track record, but an insistence not to take anything for granted or to rest on that. We’ve had clients for 30 years or more, and done dozens of projects for them, and that’s the thing I’m most proud of.
Roche’s Five Favorite Spring Flings:
- Strawberry trifle
- Booking ferry tickets
- Cardinals, the more the better
- Smoking the season’s first brisket
- Hope for a perfect week of magnolias
