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John Russell Pope's Master Plan for Dartmouth

 

Preface

A campus grows gradually over time, but its accretion is anything but random. Dartmouth's campus has been very carefully considered. The Beux-Arts trained architect John Russell Pope, who created a plan for Yale in 1919, created a master plan for Dartmouth in 1922-1923.

Dartmouth and Yale recognized Pope's influence in utterly different ways. Yale's Corporation decided to carry out the Pope plan beginning in 1920 and hired consulting architect James Gamble Rogers to design the buildings. Though the plan changed under Rogers, it still set the direction for the school for decades and was essential in determining Yale's present appearance. The school recognized Pope for his work on its first comprehensive plan, awarding him an honorary degree in 1924, as Yale's site Building a University explains.

Dartmouth also set its own architect to modify and carry out the plan Pope created for it. Jens Frederick Larson of the firm Larson & Wells became the school's most prolific designer, with Baker Library and Tuck Mall as the most prominent results. Working with Larson & Wells, Pope designed the 1922-23 Russell Sage Hall as one of the first elements of his plan. Beyond that building, Pope's influence on the campus was only indirect. The school seems to have sounded little fanfare for the architect at the time, and today virtually no recognition of Pope's role exists. In 1928 Jens Larson received an honorary MA from Dartmouth, along with Charles Platt, who consulted in 1928-1929 on the planning of Carpenter Hall, Sanborn House, and Tuck Mall.

The celebrated draftsman Otto Eggers illustrated Pope's various university plans. Together the Dartmouth plan and renderings of some of the proposed buildings made up a series of ten plates in the 1925 Architecture of John Russell Pope, vol. I. Pope would later design the Jefferson Memorial and the National Gallery of Art in Washington among many other buildings.

 

Locator
locator map

Detail of Plate 61, arrows added.
 

Index and
Comment
title page

Title page

Dartmouth College section of The Architecture of John Russell Pope
New York: William Helburn Inc., 1925

Also in this first volume are illustrations of designs for private residences, the first 25 and last 34 plates; designs for Yale University comprise plates 26-60 and plates 71-76 are designs for the Johns Hopkins University.

The illustrations are scanned in black and white, except for the title page, and are presented at actual size. The leaves of the folio in which the illustrations appeared measured 12x16 inches, so much of the white space surrounding the illustrations has been lost. The original titles were not scanned, so HTML-generated text describes the illustrations as they were described in the folio; in the case of vertically-oriented drawings this text appears in non-original locations at the top and bottom of the page. I have added the comments below and the locator map above.

 
Plate 61

Plate 61
Plan for the physical development.
1922

Note the location of the library, which follows generally the location former campus architect Charles Rich had proposed in 1913; this location preserves a mall across its front rather than ending the mall as Baker would in 1928. Here the mall ends at the east at new wing added to Wheeler. The problem with this library location was the Butterfield Museum, which Pope places behind the library ("Possible New Location of Butterfield Hall.") The wings of the library appear farther forward here than in the other illustrations.

The dormitory row alongside Tuck Drive takes the axis of Webster Ave., an axis that Butterfield Hall would follow in 1939, though nothing else would. The street Pope indicates behind the Webster Ave. fraternities would eventually be built as an alley and is now a path.

Pope's proposed Russell Sage, which he built in 1922-23 with campus architects Larson & Wells, faces Charles Rich's 1913 Hitchcock Hall and continues the mall that Rich and Bremer Pond and others began planning in 1912. Pope also projects the 1927-28 Silsby that Larson would design, and an unbuilt mirror building to replace Blunt. Note that the mall is not very long, it has a strong axis and is lined with trees rather than indiscriminately planted as today. A focal point also exists in the amphitheater at the end of the mall, an idea that Larson would continue. Note the traffic circles at end of the bridge and at the end of Webster Ave.

 
Plate 62

Plate 62
Bird's-eye view
1923

Pope gives the Green a strong axiality, as he would do on the Mall in Washington. The block-wide Inn mirrors the library at the south end of the Green and encloses a rear auto court. The corners of the Inn are inflected, as if to mirror the C&G lawn across the street. Grassy malls also give order to Fayerweather and Massachusetts Rows. An addition to the rear of Collis would close off Mass Row; the bottom of Fayerweather Row would be opened by the removal of Bartlett Hall. The building indicated east of South Fayerweather was the then-standing Culver Hall. The southeastern corner of the plan continues the pattern of Topliff Hall, which Larson & Wells had built in 1920.

 
Plate 63

Plate 63
Dormitory group
1922

The view to the east along what today is called Tuck Mall toward the Library shows a dormitory group alongside Tuck Drive. The dormitories would stand where the short street connecting Tuck Mall and Webster Avenue now is located.

 
Plate 64

Plate 64
View in dormitory court
1923

The view to the west shows the dormitory court, currently the rear lawns of the mid-1920s Sigma Nu and Zeta Psi Houses.

 
Plate 65

Plate 65
Approach to dormitories from the Drive
1923

The view to the north shows a grand entrance to the court of dormitories along Tuck Drive.

 
Plate 66

Plate 66
The Library
1922

The library is strongly influenced by Independence Hall, and its massing makes it resemble that prototype even more than Baker Library would later do. Larson would carry on other Pope elements including the arcaded connections, but Baker is generally larger in scale and less detailed and less domestic in imagery.

 
Plate 67

Plate 67
The Library wing and addition to Wheeler Hall
1923

Note the gates and fence enclosing the library court in this view to the east, as well as the academic building at right behind Webster Hall. The columned, L-shaped, Colonial addition to Wheeler forms an end to Tuck Mall.

 
Plate 68

Plate 68
The Chapel
1923

Pope proposed a more harmonious Greek Revival chapel to replace the unpopular Romanesque stonework of Rollins Chapel.

 
Plate 69

Plate 69
The Hanover Inn
1923

The front of the Inn mirrors the library. The College would build a Larson east addition to the Inn in 1923, though not this version.

 
Plate 70

Plate 70
An academic building west of the Library
1923

Pope proposes what would become Silsby Hall of 1927-28, while at left is an unbuilt mirror building that would replace Blunt.

 

Sources
Bedford, Steven Michael. John Russell Pope: Architect of Empire. New York: Rizzoli, 1998.
 
Pope, John Russell. The Architecture of John Russell Pope, vol. 1. New York: William Helburn Inc., 1925. Plates 61-69.
 
Riorden, Elizabeth: "The Campus Plans of John Russell Pope." Precis. Columbia Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, 1981.
 
Two of these plates also appear on the American Memory site of the Library of Congress:
Plate 62 Bird's eye view
Plate 65 Approach to dormitories from the Drive
 
Pope's designs for Yale appear in a Yale University Archives 300 site called Building a University.
 
Short biographical entry on John Russell Pope from MacMillan Encyclopedia of Architects.
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©1999 Scott Meacham

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