The Philadelphia firm of Kieran Timberlake is designing Dartmouth’s new replacement for Thayer Dining Hall. Mr. Timberlake lectured at Dartmouth in 2004 (see also Penn bio; Penn Gazette article).

Rather than retain the frontispiece or conduct a sustainable rehab (as at Yale Law Dining Hall), the school will replace the building entirely between 2008 to 2010.

What will the replacement look like? It is sure to display Kieran Timberlake’s signature glass wall with the Mondrian mullions somewhere, as its dining hall at Middlebury does (another image; see also Levine Hall at Penn). This technique could be a great way to bring light into the north side of the new dining hall and give a view of the trees in the cemetery.

The front on Mass Row, in contast, is where one expects to see some of the solidity of the firm’s other Middlebury buildings (they look appealingly substantial in photos) — not the minimalist experimentation of the Marks Science Center in Brooklyn or Cook House at Cornell.

Although photos suggest that the firm’s best dining rooms are the historic ones it has renovated, the main dining room is likely to be an informal one.

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[Update 11.12.2012: Broken link to lecture mention removed.]