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Last butterfly in the collection: an architect for Alpha Delta Phi (1920-1922)

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The only notable building that the book fails to attribute to any architect is the Alpha Delta house, built during the early 1920s for the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity. The continuing expansion of the Google Books database has offered up an answer: Putnam & Chandler of Boston.1”Building and Construction News Section: New Hampshire,” The American Contractor 41:51 (18 December 1920), 52-53. The report states that work was already under way on the house by December of 1920:

Putnam & Chandler later designed the Theta Delta Chi house of 1926:

Other interesting gleanings:

–More than a decade before he designed the Church of Christ (the White Church) in Hanover (1935), Hobart Upjohn designed a church for St. Barnabas in Norwich.2”Building and Construction News Department,” The American Contractor 38:51 (22 December 1917), 36. Upjohn and St. Barnabas are covered in the Norwich Walking Tour.

–Psi Upsilon fraternity had William Lescaze, of Howe & Lescaze, design an unbuilt replacement house during 1931.3Lorraine Welling Lanmon, William Lescaze, Architect (Art Alliance, 1987), 112. The Modernist firm was erecting the PSFS Building (Wikipedia) in Philadelphia at the time.

–Prolific Hartford architect Louis Sheldon Newton designed a 40 x 60 house for a “Phi Sigma Nu” fraternity at Dartmouth.4”Society Buildings,” The American Contractor 37:23 (3 June 1916), 38. The name rings no bells, but the date suggests that this could be the demolished Arts & Crafts house of Kappa Sigma.

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References
↑1 ”Building and Construction News Section: New Hampshire,” The American Contractor 41:51 (18 December 1920), 52-53.
↑2 ”Building and Construction News Department,” The American Contractor 38:51 (22 December 1917), 36.
↑3 Lorraine Welling Lanmon, William Lescaze, Architect (Art Alliance, 1987), 112.
↑4 ”Society Buildings,” The American Contractor 37:23 (3 June 1916), 38.

New training space for sports medicine — where to put it?

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The Dartmouth has an interesting report on sports medicine at the college. First, it is intriguing that the sports medicine staffers fall under the direction of Health Services rather than the Athletic Department. Second, the Athletic Department is looking to have a training building built:

The Athletic Department and Health Services are currently considering the possibility of creating larger training rooms where the sports medicine staff can work together, which may be realized within the next two years, Galbraith said. This would ideally involve not just an expansion of the current training rooms inside Davis Varsity House, but the construction of an entirely new facility near Scully-Fahey Field — creating two “hubs” for the sports medicine program, Turco said.

Wouldn’t this be a natural function to combine with the indoor practice facility? Is that why the Scully-Fahey area is proposed? If not, one good place to put the training rooms would be the site next to Davis Varsity House:

two sites for training space building

Potential sites for a training building: west of Davis Varsity House, and near Scully-Fahey (based on a Bing aerial).

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[Update 09.08.2012: Even though the western (tennis court) site is right next to the gym, it is reserved by the 2002 master plan for academic uses because it is so close to the center of campus. That makes sense.]

A timber-framed building at the Organic Farm

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The Dartmouth Organic Farm on Lyme Road is planning to demolish a 50-year-old barn on the property and replace it with a timber-framed building to serve as a Sustainability Center, according to The Dartmouth. The builder of the new building will be TimberHomes LLC of Vershire, Vermont, a firm established by DOC historian David Hooke.


Google Street View: the old barn is presumably the one on the left.

Bing aerial.

The West End and other topics

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  • Dartmouth Now has a post on the 75th anniversary of the Appalachian Trail, and The Dartmouth has an article.
  • The old through-truss bridge over the Connecticut at Lebanon is being replaced by the state highway department. The old and new bridges appear side-by-side in the Bing aerial.
  • The Hood has a page on the installation of the Kelly sculpture.
  • With little fanfare, the college/town-owned Hanover Water Company has been renamed the Trescott Water Company. Find some info at the Hanover Conservancy.
  • A beer garden at the Hop? (Newhampshire.com).
  • The owner of Jesse’s Restaurant on Route 120 is building a medical office building nearby (Valley News). Medical office buildings are popular: DHMC’s Heater Road Building had planning approval as private development when the hospital took over the project (DHMC has video about the architect and builder, several renderings, and other info).
  • Baker Library’s Reserve Corridor, now known as the Orozco Room, is being refurbished.
  • An old neighborhood in Hanover has developed what seems to be a new name, the West End. As far as one can tell from the web, this neighborhood occupies most of Hanover’s southwestern quarter, West of Main and south of Wheelock. The town is considering whether to designate the West End as a Heritage District (Planning Board minutes Jan. 24, 2012 pdf).
  • The college built a new chilled water plant next to the VAC (Bond info pdf, A-9).
  • Ore Koren ’12 created Dartmouth 1820s-1850s, an interesting collection documenting student life during the early nineteenth century.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Newhampshire.com removed; broken links to planning minutes and bond report fixed.]

Dartmouth Row as a “living-learning center”

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Dartmouth is fortunate that its “old main” and the buildings surrounding it in the original core of the campus have not been turned into a purely administrative headquarters. The four buildings of Dartmouth Row are the home to frequently-used classrooms and offices, including those of the departments of Classics and languages.

But could Dartmouth Row be used for something else? Could it be put to a more exciting purpose? Could the upper levels of Dartmouth Hall, or of all of the buildings in Dartmouth Row, be reconfigured as traditional dormitory space?

After decades of neglecting the original student rooms that line its Jefferson-designed Lawn, the University of Virginia created a competitive application process during the 1950s. The move invigorated the Lawn, and now living on the Lawn creates a membership in a sort of honor society. Some of the rooms are reserved for residents chosen by particular organizations.

Reed Hall before 1870, author's collection

Reed Hall before 1870

Students have never lived in the current Dartmouth Hall, but they roomed in its predecessor from 1784 to 1904. The building also held classrooms the whole time, and after 1895 student rooms were limited to the top floor. Students also lived in Wentworth and Thornton Halls beginning in 1829. Although Wentworth became all-academic in 1871, Thornton became all-residential in 1898 before switching to classrooms in 1912.

Finally, Reed Hall housed students in its third level from its opening (1840) and later installed students in its second level (1885) and first level (1904). Subsequent remodelings turned Reed into an all-academic building.

The college could convert the top two levels of Dartmouth Hall into a dormitory. The ground-level and basement-level classrooms, including 105 Dartmouth, would stay; the department offices would move, perhaps into an expanded Bartlett Hall or to a building projected for the west side of Berry Row.

Why do this? The change would return some life to the Green, and it would open up new housing right at the center of campus. Putting the school’s iconic building to a traditional use would provide a model for mixing academic and residential life on other parts of campus. The group of students allowed to live in Dartmouth Hall would be an exclusive crowd; if it seemed too much like a clique, then the entire row could be made into a dormitory cluster, with classrooms on the ground level.

Heraldry: The Tuck School and the Temple at Hephaestos

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I. The Geisel School. The big topic in Dartmouth heraldry is the Geisel School of Medicine’s new shield, mentioned here. It contains the familiar elements of the river, pine, founding date, and book, and it omits the depiction of the old Medical Building, which was demolished about 55 years ago. It deserves an analysis of its own.

II. The Graduate Studies Program. The Grad Studies shield seems to be receiving a big push, with a banner for Dartmouth Night (Grad Studies’ Flickr photostream) and the distribution of decals to students (Flickr).

The shield carries on what seem to be the unifying elements in Dartmouth’s armorial family: (1) the use of a founding date and (2) the placement of wavy lines in the base of the shield to represent the Connecticut River.

Here is how it looks in the group (published in March, shortly before the medical shield was replaced):

Shields image from Vox the Vote
Shields representing Dartmouth and Associated Schools, from Vox the Vote.

The vertical year on the Grad Studies shield does not seem entirely successful in this rendition.

III. The Tuck School.

Graphically, the chunkiness of the Tuck shield, at the far right above, is appealing. It uses an extreme closeup view to cut off the building’s eaves, and its heavy line causes the shield border itself to read as part of the temple front. The Eighteenth-century letterforms are also nice and relate to Dartmouth’s seal, although they are not of the same 1990s (?) language as the rest of the Tuck shield.

The one thing that has always been disturbing about the Tuck shield is that it depicts a nonexistent building. It is not a stylized version of Tuck Hall’s portico; instead it represents a hexastyle Doric temple, like the temple at Hephaestos.


Temple at Hephaestos, from Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (1905) via Google Books.

Compare the row of six squat columns without capitals in Hephaestos to the Ionic portico of four relatively attenuated columns in Tuck Hall:

Tuck Hall by Meacham

Tuck Hall temple front.


Shield with border removed and eaves extended, treating border as representing outer columns.


Alternatively, shield with border removed entirely to leave a quadristyle portico.

Perhaps this should not be irksome, since Dartmouth’s own shield depicts a nonexistent building as well. One way to resolve the problem would be for the Tuck School to build a hexastyle temple front somewhere on its campus.

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[Update 08.16.2012: Green temple-only illustrations added.]

More details on the Academic Center, Dana’s move

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The previous post on this topic mentioned that the current rendering (source) of the quad facade differs slightly from an earlier rendering published during May. Some of the changes:

  • The eastern (most distant) of the three masses has gone from light-colored stone cladding to something more uniform, possibly metal, and has gained a glazed projection or Window of Appearance. The mass also appears to have taken on a stepped form where it meets the rest of the building.
  • The central mass is still a glass box, but the detailing has changed. The third level seems to have been omitted or made into a mezzanine.
  • The nearer, western mass has changed from red brick to stone or concrete. The walls of the ground level are largely blank, suggesting that this part of the building will house Dana Library.

Where will Dana go between the demolition of its current building in 2013 and the completion of the new one in 2016? It will occupy Homes 37 and 50, former Nursing School buildings that are now known, as a result of two of the school’s better E-911 naming decisions, as 37 and 50 Dewey Field Road.

The Biomedical Libraries Blog has a plan of the library in its temporary home, with the layout designed by ADD Inc.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to library plan replaced.]

[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to library blog fixed.]

[Update 08.19.2012: It looks as if the addresses of the buildings at 37 and 50 Dewey Field Road have been consolidated, and the building built in 1950 (i.e. Home 50) is now numbered 37 Dewey Field Road.]

The Academic Center is by Kyu Sung Woo Architects

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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.”]

Jens Larson’s own house, etc.

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  • Jens Larson’s house and studio on East Wheelock Street are for sale.
  • The Dartmouth has an article on Shattuck Observatory.
  • The Valley News reports that the New London, N.H. realtor Four Seasons Sotheby’s International Realty has opened an office in Hanover. It is on Lebanon Street, east of C&A’s Pizza.
  • A traffic study (pdf) raised the possibility of erecting a 663-car parking deck atop the Ledyard lot at the bottom of Tuck Drive. A shuttle bus would ferry employees from the lot up to campus. While a pine-screened parking garage alongside the river could be an interesting thing, Dartmouth seems wise to have avoided this scheme, and the consultants declined to recommend it.
  • Too bad there’s no tram to the Hospital. The idea of a little train through woods is neat, but it wouldn’t save much time compared to the road, which is relatively direct; it is probably not worth the hassle. And on the other hand it could not run through the woods the whole way: it would have to go down Park Street and then along Lebanon Street.
  • The great Reggie Watts (video) was photographed eating a sandwich at Amarna on East Wheelock.
  • The computer store is moving to McNutt (The Dartmouth).
  • The LSC got LEED’s platinum certification. See also sustainability in The Dartmouth.
  • The Radcliffe Observatory Quarter of Oxford occasionally receives coverage here. The old hospital north of the university is still visible in this excellent and somewhat outdated oblique aerial from Bing, with the eighteenth-century observatory owned by the newly-formed Green Templeton College prominent. Most of those buildings have been demolished, as this Google aerial shows:


And now some construction has begun, as this Bing aerial shows:



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[Update 08.19.2012: Tram comment reworded.]

The need for a new Alumni Hall

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The Hop expansion is going to take over the existing Alumni Hall as a performing-arts space. This makes sense: the big room is right there in the heart of things and seems to be underused.

Although Dartmouth has had an “alumni hall” only since 1962, the idea is worth continuing. In the Hop, the hall is a big multipurpose space that, although not as practical as Spaulding for alumni meetings, is distinguished from all other spaces by its decoration: it attempts to serve as a chamber of memory and sentiment. The Dartmouth Green walls display wooden recognition plaques and banners with the college seal and arms of the second earl of Dartmouth.

A new alumni hall should be a freestanding building; where should it be erected? The most prominent site is the vacant lot in front of Sherman, but that site should be reserved for a future library. What about the vacant lot north of Parkhurst, as an addition to Blunt Alumni Center? A major wing there could create a new and compatible façade in the rhythm of Administration Row.

A snippet of a 2004-era Thayer School master plan

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The Koetter | Kim & Associates website includes an intriguing sketch, of which this is an excerpt:


Thayer School master plan by Koetter Kim ca. 2004

Ca. 2004 Thayer School master plan by Koetter Kim

Note the expansion of Thayer School all the way down Thayer Drive to West Wheelock Street, giving a “public” face to engineering (or business, for that matter) for the first time. Bold! Although the scale of the buildings in the image might not be the most appropriate, this would be a better use of the vacant land than what exists.

Source: Koetter | Kim & Associates > Projects > Projects List > MacLean Engineering Sciences Center > fourth image.

Looking ahead to master planning

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The 2008 “leadership statement” for the last presidential search (pdf) favored the restarting of the master planning process and indicated some of the puzzles the planners will face:

The College believes that it has largely, though not entirely, fulfilled the ambitions of its successive Master Plans. In the course of the next Presidency, Dartmouth will probably need to continue the evolution of these plans, with careful attention to maintaining the walking campus and preserving the ethos of the College while allowing for new demands for high tech classrooms, more complex laboratories and improved facilities for student life. This will require a careful analysis of which functions should remain at the core of the campus and which can move easily to a periphery.

The college is “Currently engaged in Master Planning” (May 2012 Building Congress pdf) and an announcement of the selection of an architecture/planning firm is expected in the near future.

A memorandum published in connection with the Academic Center/Williams bond (pdf) states on A-10:

In concert with institution-wide strategic planning, Dartmouth has also initiated development of a Master Plan to ensure that campus design and space support its evolving needs. Designed to provide a campus framework for the next 10 years, the Master Plan should be complete in the spring of 2013.

The memorandum also notes that planning is under way to determine the spatial needs of an expansion in the number of faculty.

Projection on the Hop

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On October 12, artist Ross Ashton will project a work commissioned by Dartmouth onto the entrance facade of the Hop (The Dartmouth. Ashton seems to use heraldry a fair amount, and coats of arms or flags appear prominently in his projections on the Gibbs Building at King’s College, Cambridge (Flickr, Ashton’s blog), Buckingham Palace (Flickr), and Caerphilly Castle in Wales (ET Now).

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to projection notice replaced with link to The Dartmouth.]

The hospital’s Advanced Surgical Center addition

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We know about the recent go-ahead for the Williamson Translational Research Building at the south end of the DHMC complex (Skylight magazine Fall 2007 (pdf), Dartmed, Street View of site), but what about the already-begun Advanced Surgical Center and Clinical MRI addition at the north end?

Bing aerial of DHMC showing excavation at north end for MRI addition.

Also a “translational research” facility, the MRI addition was designed by Payette Associates of Boston. Work apparently began during August of 2011 and is set to conclude during 2013. See the numerous impressive images at the firm’s page. An overview appears in Skylight (pdf) and a Lebanon planning document (pdf) shows how DHMC expanded the wing slightly during design to accommodate different equipment.

History-based weirdness on a pair of pants

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The Co-op is advertising a pair of pants with the year 1763 on them.

That’s right, it’s the “Appropriation 250th Anniversary 1763 Dartmouth Banded Pant”:

New for the upcoming 2013 Dartmouth Co-op Apparel Season: Honoring the 250th Anniversary of New Hampshire Colonial Governor Benning Wentworth’s approval of a £50 appropriation and a promise of a tract of land in western New Hampshire for the purpose of Reverend Eleazar Wheelock to found a school to train missionaries for service among the native population, which would become our beloved Dartmouth College six years later. Celebrate the sestercentennial of this conception moment in Dartmouth College’s history. (Mayo, Lawrence Shaw. John Wentworth: Governor of New Hampshire, 1767-1775. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1921. 104-105. Print.)

Although it is inspiring to see catalog copy citing its sources, this explanation is bewildering. One almost suspects that the Co-op found itself stuck with a shipment of misprinted pants and had to figure out how to unload them¦

The cited source provides on page 105:

The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock of Lebanon, Connecticut, after at least one failure, succeeded in interesting the governor in his school which trained missionaries, both white and red, for service among the Indians. How much Benning Wentworth cared about civilizing the savages is a question, but he approved an appropriation of £50 for this purpose in 1763, and offered Wheelock a tract of land for his school if he should choose to move it to western New Hampshire. This was encouraging to Wheelock, but he did not at once avail himself of the latter proposition because the continuance of his work depended largely upon funds which he hoped to raise in Great Britain.

The “school which trained missionaries” was Moor’s Charity School, and the text suggests that the appropriation was meant simply to support the operation of that existing school. Benning Wentworth obviously wanted Wheelock to move the school to New Hampshire, but the 1763 gift did not establish or even support Dartmouth College any more than did the ca. 1754 gift of Colonel Joshua More/Moor (or Wheelock’s early-1740s entry into the Latin School market). See, for example, Washington & Lee University, an 1813 college that evolved from a grammar school established about 20 miles away in 1749; it uses the 1749 date without hesitation (Wikipedia).

As the text goes on to state, Lord Dartmouth kicked off the fundraising with a 1767 gift that, although directed at the charity school, actually would be used to establish the college. Benning Wentworth’s nephew John succeeded him as the colonial governor and granted the college a charter in December of 1769. On July 5, 1770, Wheelock selected Hanover as the site of the school.

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[Update 08.12.2012: Minor wording change in final paragraph.]

Amending Dartmouth’s 1769 Charter

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I. The 2010 Amendment. The “official” online version of Dartmouth’s charter used to be an html version provided by the Government Documents office. Recently, the Trustees have made available a June 2010 revision (pdf) with helpful side- and footnotes. (Some indication of authorship for the notations would be nice, since most are many decades old.)

The reason for the revision is found in footnote 8 on page 9:

By vote taken June 11, 2010, the charter was amended to add the following provision required by the Internal Revenue Service’s regulations concerning tax-exempt organizations: “Upon the dissolution of the Corporation, its assets shall be distributed for one or more exempt purposes within the meaning of section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, or corresponding section of any future federal tax code, or shall be distributed to the federal government, or to a state or local government for a public purpose. Any such assets not disposed of shall be disposed of by the Superior Court of the county in which the principal office of the Corporation is then located, exclusively for such purposes or to such organization or organizations, as said Court shall determine, which are organized and operated exclusively for such purposes.”

II. The description of the 2007 amendment. The notes do not quote the 2007 amendment that expanded the board, and the description of that amendment remains a curiosity. The October 2007 version of the Charter explained the amendment this way:

By vote taken September 8, 2007, the charter was amended to increase the number of Trustees to twenty-six, provided that the number of Trustees to be elected upon nomination by the alumni shall be eight, and that the Governor ex-officio and the President during his or her term of service shall continue to be Trustees.

As pointed out here, that note suggested that the Charter itself (rather than the board’s resolutions or bylaws) had been amended to describe the system of nominations. If that is what happened, it would be notable as probably the first time that nominations (or for that matter alumni) were ever mentioned in the Charter. One would assume that the traditional practice up to this time was to amend the Charter to increase the number of Trustees and, at the same time, to amend the bylaws to increase the number of nominations.

The explanatory note has changed in the latest version of the Charter. On page 4 (the continuation of footnote 2), the 2010 Charter states:

By vote taken September 8, 2007, the charter was amended to increase the number of Trustees to twenty-six, provided that the number of Trustees to be elected by the Board upon nomination by the Board shall be sixteen, that the number of Trustees to be elected upon nomination by the alumni shall be eight, and that the Governor ex-officio and the President during his or her term of service shall continue to be Trustees.

(Emphasis added). The amendment has not changed, only the board’s description of it. Things would be clearer if the board put the text of the amendment itself into the footnotes. Or, if the speculation is correct that “alumni” is not in the Charter, the board could clarify matters by describing its actions with somewhat more precision.

An Academic Center update

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A memorandum published in connection with the Academic Center/Williams bond (pdf) states on A-9 and A-10 that the North Campus Academic Center will replace Gilman and Dana, is scheduled to begin during July of 2013, and is expected to be substantially complete by March of 2016.

The building is planned to house the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology (the college was mum about this in an article in The Dartmouth, and the plan might still be in flux); the Center for Healthcare Delivery Science; the Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice; Dana Biomedical Library; and the administration of the Geisel School.

Elsewhere, it is noted that the Academic Center is a registered LEED project.

And what about the bridge to Kellogg — will it survive? It could be hidden behind the screen visible on the left side of the image published here recently.