The designers behind the planned North Campus Academic Center are the Cambridge, Mass. firm of KSWA. Firm founder Kyu Sung Woo (Wikipedia) designed the Olympic Village for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul (firm page).
The firm’s campus work includes a pair of dorms on Coffin Street at Bowdoin (firm page) and the Nerman Museum in Kansas (Architectural Record, Biemiller post at the Buildings & Grounds blog of The Chronicle).
The project page for the North Campus Academic Center at Dartmouth provides a slightly modified version of the May view of the building’s rear or quad facade as well as a view to the southwest showing the “front” facade on College Street.
What’s most notable is the siting: this building has some major planning implications. The building is not an east-west bar as its predecessor Gilman was. Instead, it appears to follow a northeast-southwest orientation, forming an angled tee shape (a favored form — see the Nerman plan). The dominant main block will follow the angle of College Street as it heads off toward Lyme. The southern end of the building, the stem of the tee, appears to adopt the orientation of the McLaughlin Cluster.
Thus, instead of forming a rectilinear wall along the bottom of the medical quad as Gilman did, the building opens like a trap door, allowing the quad to spill out to the McLaughlin Cluster.
Some new details about the building’s contents and surroundings:
Classrooms, meeting rooms, a graduate student lounge and social space, a cafe, and a large scale forum will be available to the Dartmouth community. The building will be set in a landscape featuring outdoor performances, art events, and a gathering space for major events such as the Medical School commencement.
The Life Sciences Center also was described as framing a space for commencements. Thus the commencement space mentioned above seems likely to be the existing medical quad rather than the sunken lawn visible in the first illustration.
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[Update 08.11.2012: KSWA’s authorship of the Academic Center was mentioned as early as March 9 on a Korea.net article titled “Design by Korean architect dazzles in Boston.”]