This is impressive and fairly unexpected: an Oregon firm called The Urban Collaborative has helped design a master plan and building code for CRREL.

Here’s a recent aerial of the site from Google Maps:

Master planning started back in 2010 (see Public Works Digest pdf). The Army bought from Dartmouth the bulk of the land beneath its labs during 2012 (post).

The development next door to the north of CRREL is Rivercrest, which is owned by the college and has a thoughtful New Urbanist master plan of its own (post). Progress on that redevelopment has been halted for several years, and the plan lives only on paper.

Perhaps the two institutions can jointly reduce the suburbanity of the area by connecting each of their grids to the other. The CRREL plan even depicts, perhaps optimistically, a grand boulevard running west from Lyme Road toward the river, lined on one side with a new CRREL signature building and on the other with commercial blocks not previously shown in the Rivercrest plan. (Connections to Kendal to the north are probably too much to ask, however.)