Eamonn Kevin Roche FAIA (June 14, 1922 – March 1, 2019) was an Irish-born American Pritzker Prize-winning architect. Kevin Roche was the archetypal modernist and "member of an elite group of third generation modernist architects — James Stirling, Jørn Utzon, and Robert Venturi — and is considered to be the most logical and systematic designer of the group. He and his partner John Dinkeloo of the firm KRJDA produced over a half-century of matchless creativity."

Roche and Dinkeloo were responsible for the design/master planning of over 200 built projects in both the U.S. and abroad. These projects include 8 museums, 38 corporate headquarters, 7 research facilities, performing arts centers, theaters, and campus buildings for six universities. In 1967 he created the master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and thereafter designed all of the new wings and installation of many collections, including the reopened American and Islamic wings.

Born in Dublin and a graduate from University College Dublin, Roche went to the United States to study with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. In the U.S., he became the principal designer for Eero Saarinen and opened his own architectural firm in 1966.

Among other awards, Roche received the Pritzker in 1982, the Gold Medal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1990, and the AIA Gold Medal in 1993.

Roche was born in Dublin, Ireland, during one of the most tumultuous periods in Irish history: the Irish Civil War. Eamon Roche, Kevin's father, had been jailed twice for "revolutionary activities". Kevin was born during his father's second imprisonment. After Eamon was released from prison, he moved his family far away from war-torn Dublin to the pastoral hamlet of Mitchelstown in southwestern Ireland. Situated at the foothills of the Galtee Mountain Range, Roche's upbringing was anything but typical. It was forged by Eamon's keen managerial oversight of the Mitchelstown Dairy Co-operative in which Kevin worked alongside his father as dairy farmers. Eamon Roche successfully annexed all the surrounding dairy cooperatives, forging them into the largest in southwest Ireland. Later, the creamery was bought out by KerryGold Creamery.

Roche's life-changing moment came when his father asked him to design a warehouse to store the cheese that the dairy farms produced. Seeing his natural abilities unfold, Eamon enrolled the young Roche in a secondary school in Cashel, County Tipperary called Rockwell College. It is a well-known school in Ireland where Éamon de Valera, one of the Republic of Ireland's founding fathers, once taught mathematics. While Roche attended Rockwell College, his interest in architecture came about after reading a book by the English architect John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture. He recalled that the book "was not the easiest to read but was very interesting".

In 1940, Kevin returned to Dublin to continue his interest in architecture at University College of Dublin, or UCD. His first architectural drawing was of a pig enclosure composed of concrete blocks. Though initially trained in German Beaux Arts, this gave way to modernism and post-modernism interests. After graduating from UCD in 1945, Roche made the circuit with practically every well-known modernist of architecture: Michael Scott in Dublin from 1945 to 1946, Maxwell Fry in London from summer to fall of 1946, then Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer at Illinois Institute of Technology in 1948.

After less than one year at IIT, Roche did not have enough money to continue for a second year. Since he could not receive his master's degree without funds, he instead thought of putting his architectural skills to practical use. In 1949, he moved to New York City and "badgered the UN Planning Office for a job". He was hired at the planning office for the United Nations Headquarters building in New York City. He began working on the United Nations complex at the firm of Harrison & Abramovitz and stayed on for eight months. During Christmas of 1950, he left to visit his family back in Ireland, but when he returned, his job had been eliminated.