The biggest news in the flood of recent announcements involves the Life Sciences Building. This undergraduate lab has been in the works for several years; it has always been clear that it must be near Gilman (the existing undergrad lab) and the adjacent Medical School, but the degree to which it would be shared by (or might even replace) parts of the Medical School has fluctuated.

The school has just announced that the building will not stand near Gilman on the site of the Modular Lab (1980s, “The Pizza Hut Building”) but will occupy the site of Strasenburgh Hall (originally a dormitory, designed by Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty, 1962-1963) and Butler Hall (the utilitarian bulding down the hill, 1964), and that the Modular Lab will still be done away with to expand the Medical School’s existing lawn.

The designer of the nearly-$100 million building is Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a firm that participated in the North Campus competition and has designed some of the most visible (and coolly, impossibly minimalist) Modernist architecture of the early twenty-first century: the Apple Stores of Tokyo (another image), Manhattan, and elsewhere.

The site plan indicates that the Life Sciences Building will not only stand near the Medical School, it will form an essential part of its campus. The Medical School’s ongoing half-departure from Hanover in favor of its suburban Lebanon campus and its decision not to claim a part of the Life Sciences Lab as originally proposed (now “the supporting systems will not need to accommodate the demands of other research sciences”) hint at a continuing Dartmouth takeover of the D.M.S. campus.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Fifth Avenue store gallery replaced.]