Knights Tower Knighted

Whether you deem it an architectural modernist icon or a human-dwarfing iconosaurus, there’s no ignoring the Knights of Columbus Tower.

The New Haven Preservation Trust (NHPT) not only did not ignore it — it awarded the building and the team that restored its heating, cooling, and glazing systems the Landmark Plaque ​“for extraordinary devotion to preservation.”

The knighting took place Thursday at the NHPT’s annual awards ceremony at City Hall. The event drew the winners, their admirers, and a crowd of officials to the second floor atrium.

The awards were presented by NHPT’s preservation awards committee chair, Duo Dickinson, who said the theme of the year’s awards was ​“adapt or die.”

Dickinson’s theme meant that the committee singled out buildings that were updated and thereby saved through changing use and applying technology creatively with an eye to preserving the city’s architectural legacy.

Two other awards were also presented: The House Preservation Award went to the Italianate 1850 Nelson Hotchkiss House at Chapel Street near Olive. Its current owners, Andrew Ehrgood and Jane Lee, restored rotting wooden columns and stairs, matching wherever possible the original.

NHPT’s Merit Plaque went to Winchester Lofts, formerly part of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. The owners, Forest City Residential Group, and their architects adapted spaces originally designed for huge machines that lay in profound decay for decades to now house hundreds of people in apartments and offices.

Of Kevin Roche​‘s 1969 K of C tower, Dickinson’s prepared remarks declared, ​“Its mid-20th century technologies of heating/cooling and glazing were in such a state of failure that change was required or a new headquarters would need to be found for the charitable institution.

“Committed to the city of New Haven, the Knights of Columbus decided to stay. Committed to architectural excellence, their reinvention of the tower’s glass infill and integrated HVAC systems preserved the building’s distinctive design and functional viability.”

In layman’s language, this meant that the building’s facility manager, Paul Bello, was dealing with a building of some 700 windows, most floor to ceiling in height, facing all points of the compass, and, at 23 stories high, whipping winds and all kinds of powerful weather.

“We had failed glazing, and [accumulating over time] 60 cracked windows,” Bello said prior to the ceremony. There were serious leaks, employees were uncomfortable.”

Instead of merely replacing the cracked windows in a stick-your-thumb-in-the-hole-in-the-dike manner, Bello and the architectural firm Leo A. Daly approached the building with a recognition, as the Trust citation said, and a ​“reverence” for how it was designed, with its glass, shading system, and HVAC all connected.

They did not take the easy route. Over three years they invested the money, with an eye to long-term savings, to replace the curtain with carefully chosen ​“structure-stiffening” glass that’s both energy efficient and able to cope more securely with violent winds.

“We brought the entire system up to safety standards of today, as opposed to 1969,” he said.

The half-century-old glass skin, butt-glazed as in the original, is all new, but looks unchanged.

Similar updates were made in integrating new sunshades made of building-securing new steel, without compromising the original design.

If there was one challenge that Bello remembered at the ceremonies, it was trying to find new steel that looked like the original beams that link the building from pier to pier.

The trick was to match the original steel by ordering up pre-weathered steel, Bello said.

The architects and workmen did the entire project while the building was fully occupied by its 700 employees. The secret: working mainly at night.

Bello said the investment is already paying off: ​“Employee comfort is ten times higher, and there are lower energy costs.”