Knights of Columbus Headquarters

As you’re driving on the I-95, the many quickly unfolding layers of the Connecticut Turnpike take you by surprise, and you make a wrong turn onto Oak Street Connector headed to New Haven. Finding it difficult to resist the scent of pizza coming from Wooster Square, you quickly forget about your wrong turn and decide that you might as well make a quick detour and pass through the city. Whether you’re coming into New Haven from the highway, the station, or the harbor, it is likely that your first sight of Downtown is that of the Knights of Columbus headquarters. Towering 320 feet in the air, consisting of 23 stories, and bolstered vertically at all four corners by clay tile-clad cast-in-place concrete pillars spanning the entire height of the building, this office building and headquarters signals your entry into Downtown New Haven through its sturdy, monumental stature.

This impression of urban centrality is facilitated through a formalized expression of structural integrity and differentiation. The large, almost silo-like¹ columns are linked horizontally on the upper 20 floors by the industrial weathering steel of horizontal girders — all identically distributed across all four faces of the building — evoking a sense of formalized urban modernism. Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, the lead architects, were tasked with the design of this headquarters for the Knights of Columbus at 1 Columbus Plaza (the plaza carved out as a part of the structural ensemble). Beginning construction in 1967, the Knights of Columbus tower was in part supported by the Church Street Redevelopment Project aimed to modernize New Haven and craft a model city to combat industrial decline. Complemented by another one of Roche’s designs for the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, which shared its above-roof parking lot with the Knights building, the office building reshaped the landscape of the previous small-town scene of local clothes shops and relatively low profile buildings.²

The Knights of Columbus has occupied the building since its construction was completed in 1969, constantly expanding their network and operational capacity. Centralizing ownership and control over the landscape so as to formalize and modernize the public image of Downtown New Haven seems to have been just that — the production of an image funded by both public and private interests. Today, the private organization the Knights of Columbus interfaces with the public sphere in several institutionalized contexts and business relations. From insurance, to asset management, to real estate, to several satellite commemorations of itself, the operations of the Knights of Columbus seem increasingly disconnected with the idealistic promise imbued in their image, and more concerned with accruing wealth. In other words, the public redevelopment projects in New Haven of the 1960s were successful at creating a new image, but an image that served not as a basis for further development, but rather consolidation and privatization of public space. The landscapes and communities surrounding the building do not seem to have followed suit in the scale of economic success and control over the public landscape that is afforded the Knights of Columbus.