The Fuller Audits conducted under the Student Life Initiative about ten years ago pointed out the building-code failings of each student society house. Almost every fraternity, sorority, or co-ed house needed an enclosed exterior fire stair and possibly an elevator. Since then, the College has altered or added onto the nine or so society houses it owns, one society has built itself a new house, and about sixteen other groups have been working independently to add to their own houses.

The variety of approaches is relatively small. Long brick buildings designed as fraternities usually get extended at one end, while frame houses closer to a square or a tee in plan are given a rear ell. Almost every addition is “contextual” and attempts to harmonize with the building to which it is attached. The two latest additions represent the extremes.

Theta Delta Chi is extending to the north its north-south oriented building adjacent Thayer Dining Hall using a design by the Portland, Maine firm of Arcadia Designworks. Arcadia’s outlook is broader than most — the firm also handles industrial design and apparently created an improved lobster trap — and its addition to Theta Delt is unusually “contemporary” in style.

The extension avoids both the brick construction and the roof form of the historic house designed by Putnam & Chandler of Boston. If Hanover had a Design Review Commission, as many cities these days do, it probably would not approve this addition.

Zeta Psi, on the other hand, has commissioned a firm intimately familiar with the work of Jens Larson (Smith & Vansant Architects of Norwich) to expand its house in several directions. Saucier & Flynn, the College’s landscape architects, are handling the landscape design. The conceptual drawings (pdf) include floorplans bearing a notation rarely seen in architecture, an indication of the designers’ familiarity with the client: “Pong tables shown for scale.” The alterations include an extension to the west end of the house and a new gable over the two-level portico at the rear. Hanover’s zoning authorities have approved the project (pdf).

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Smith & Vansant fixed; broken link to 6 March 2008 zoning board minutes removed.]