A few years later he designed One United Nations Plaza in New York, a sculptural skyscraper of gridded, blue-green reflective glass that is nearly as abstract as his pyramids. The tower was the home of the United Nations Plaza Hotel (now the Millennium Hilton New York One UN Plaza), for which Mr. Roche designed a set of public spaces based on an intricate design of trelliswork and mirrors, endlessly reflecting. (When management wanted to renovate the hotel’s restaurant and bar in 2015, preservationists protested that Mr. Roche’s design was one of the city’s finest interiors from the 1970s, and persuaded the hotel to reverse course.)
A Patron in Indiana
The Metropolitan Museum of Art was not Mr. Roche’s only long-term client. One of his most important legacies from Saarinen was his relationship with J. Irwin Miller, chairman of the Cummins Engine Company and a patron of architecture. Mr. Miller had transformed Cummins’s hometown, Columbus, Ind., into an architecture mecca, with buildings by both Saarinen and his father, Eliel Saarinen, in addition to others by I. M. Pei, Robert Venturi (who died in September), César Pelli, Richard Meier and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
Mr. Roche met Mr. Miller when Mr. Roche was put in charge of the house in Columbus that Saarinen was designing for the Miller family, an assignment that confirmed Mr. Roche’s importance in the Saarinen office. After Saarinen’s death, Mr. Miller began to turn to Mr. Roche for commissions.
Mr. Roche designed numerous projects for Cummins, including its corporate headquarters. Although he usually declined to do private houses, he, like Saarinen, made exceptions for Mr. Miller; in 1982, he designed a lavish residence for him and his wife, Xenia Simons Miller, in Hobe Sound, Fla.
For all Mr. Roche’s delight in creating crisp, nimble architectural shapes in glass, some of his most notable early work came across as anything but light. For one of the most important projects he worked on with Saarinen, the John Deere headquarters in Moline, Ill., Mr. Roche proposed developing a kind of steel that could be allowed to rust naturally. The resulting rough, reddish-brown product, Cor-ten, became a common building material.
While the elegant Deere building, completed in 1964, was widely admired, Mr. Roche used Cor-ten to considerably less critical acclaim on two projects in New Haven: the tower headquarters of the Knights of Columbus (1969), and the adjacent New Haven Coliseum (1972). The image there was anything but light, and the rusting steel and heavy, dark brown masonry blocks and gargantuan columns gave the complex an ominous tone.
