Ivy Football

The New York Times examines the decline in Ivy football attendance that accompanied the shift from NCAA Division IA to Division IAA.

That decline is one of the reasons why Princeton recently demolished Palmer Stadium (Henry J. Hardenburgh, 1914) and replaced it with the lower-capacity Princeton Stadium (Rafael Viñoly, 1998), and why Dartmouth recently replaced some of Memorial Field’s seating with the Floren Varsity House (Centerbrook, 2006).

(The Times notes that Ivy schools’ teams “were perennial national champions from 1869 to 1939.” That should read “from 1874 to 1939,” since 1874 was the first time college football was ever played in the U.S. (Harvard v. McGill). The game that teams played for several years following 1869 was soccer. The confusion might come from Hickok Sports, which lists pre-1874 soccer games at the head of a line of football champions, or from the Rutgers University football page, which still claims that the 1869 game makes Rutgers the home of college football, although the very same webpage acknowledges that the game was played under rules “adopted from those of the London Football Association,” i.e. soccer. The first game of college football ever played between two U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875.)

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Princeton Stadium news item replaced with Wikipedia link.]

Lamb & Rich buildings list expanded

The list of works of the firm of Lamb & Rich has been expanded to include several projects:

  • House in Belle Haven Park, Greenwich, Conn.
  • Cottage for Samuel Harris in North Long Branch, N.J.
  • The Orange Club House, Brick Church, N.J.
  • House for J.A. Minott, Orange, N.J.
  • Bethel Presbyterian Church, Plainfield, N.J.
  • Three houses on Sixth Avenue for H.M. Blasdell
  • House on 68th Street for Anthony Mowbray
  • Commercial Building at 37, 39 Greene Street
  • Addition to 103-107 Prince Street for Edward Tuck and J.P. Townsend
  • Washington Life Insurance Building
  • Store at 24 East 22nd Street for W.H. Stern
  • Store at 512-516 Broadway and 55-66 Crosby Street for William H. De Forest
  • Addition to 7 Park Avenue for Charles P. Noyes
  • Franklin Bank Competition Entry
  • Unbuilt design for Brownell Hall, Barnard College

Various building topics

The Dartmouth and Vox have covered a number of building-related topics recently:

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Records Management fixed.]

Medical School continues to expand

The Medical School will add two new wings to its LeBaron Commons in Lebanon, in association with the hospital: the new Koop Complex, designed by Shepley Bulfinch Richardson & Abbott, will comprise one wing for translational research and another for the Center for Evaluative Clinical Sciences (press release | fundraising announcement | building description).

Phi Delt attribution, finally

The architect of the Phi Delta Theta (now Phi Delta Alpha) house on Webster Avenue has been elusive. Although Alexander Anderson McKenzie “built into this house his own integrity,” as a plaque inside states, he did not design the building.

The American Architect and Building News stated in its “Building Intelligence” section for November 10, 1900:

The Dartmouth College Chapter of Phi Delta Theta fraternity will erect a chapter-house on Webster Ave., after plans by Charles A. Rich, 24 Nassau St., N.Y. City. The structure will be built in the Colonial style prevailing in the college buildings, the lines in general being similar to those of the Gov. Hancock House, Boston.

The Phi

Thayer School adopts new logo

Last month, the Thayer School of Engineering adopted a new logo that incorporates a shield much more in keeping with those of Dartmouth and its other Associated Schools:


Thayer Shield

A wavy-lined representation of the Connecticut River now appears in the base of each institution’s shield.

The old logo was less heraldic and had become somewhat dated, although it has the pleasing feature of representing the hills of New Hampshire and Vermont:


Thayer Logo, old

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[Update 08.31.2013: Broken link to new logo replaced.]

Tuck Living-Learning Center plans refined

The Tuck School has released new details about its Living-Learning Center (“the Tuck LLC”), including plans and renderings showing it on the site of Hinman Hall in the River Cluster.

The east-facing outdoor space that the LLC creates will be known as the Class of 1980 Courtyard. On the west, a room known as the McLaughin Atrium will look through a broad, curving facade toward Vermont.

More preservation in the computer age

Google’s recent acquisition of the garage where it began as a company in 1998 and the preservation of the garage where Hewlett and Packard began working in 1938 point out the importance of documenting Bradley and Gerry Halls and marking their sites after they are demolished, since they have some role in the history of computing. Demolition begins as soon as this month.

Bradley is not, however, the place where Kemeny and Kurtz and others created BASIC in 1964, as reported here in “A Plea for the Shower Towers.” A College news release states that BASIC was invented in College Hall, and that is indeed where the school put its GE-235 during February of 1964 after taking delivery of it. BASIC first ran that May and the school moved the machines to the existing Bradley Hall later.

An 1870s expedition to Mount Moosilauke

Camp Dartmouth ca. 1870

This is one half of an intriguing stereoview. The sign says “Camp Dartmouth” followed by what appear to be an apostrophe, the numerals 71, and a period: Camp Dartmouth ’71. The costumed men in the camp are trying hard not to look like students.

Editors of The Dartmouth explained during the spring of 1870 that an “Expedition to Moosilauk Mountain” was being led by J.H. Huntington of the New Hampshire Geographic Survey, with help from Professor C.H. Hitchcock and several citizens of Warren, including George A. Little ’71. One A.F. Clough, “the finest stereoscopic artist in New Hampshire,” took stereoviews on the mountain. This might be one of those views. The card itself says nothing except “Group Series” on the front.

Dartmouth’s architecture in the news

Many thanks to the Review for mentioning this site in an interview. A few points will always get jumbled over the phone, and this might be a good opportunity to clarify them for the record:

  • “National Historic Registry” should read “National Register of Historic Places” and “the register.”
  • “There are state and federal tax breaks” should read “There are state and federal tax breaks for renovations. . . . In addition, anything that gets on the list has to have the owner’s permission to get listed.”
  • “There are state and federal tax breaks . . . largest in terms of commercial properties but still significant for even a home owner. But the real reason for a college to apply is that it is a blue ribbon” should read “Now, if you’re a college or university that’s not a homeowner and not a business, the real reason to be on the list is because it’s a seal of approval. It’s a blue ribbon. . . . Those tax breaks only come when you renovate your building, generally.”
  • “Clement will be supplanted by a new visual arts building designed by McCado and Silveti — a very academic, theoretical type firm — to go on that site” should read “The firm of Machado and Silvetti — big names, a very theoretical, academic-oriented firm — are designing a new visual arts building to go on that site.”
  • “Loews — that notoriously hard to find movie theatre — will, I think be moved next to the site on Lebanon Street” should read “Loew’s Auditorium will move from the Hood into this new building, and I have a feeling it will be placed on the street, on Lebanon Street, so that it will become more of a public movie theater.”
  • “If you go to Oxford you will typically see a dining hall in the vicinity of the chapel” should read “If you go to Oxford, you will typically see a dining hall in the same ‘range’ ([i.e.] the same building) as the chapel.”
  • “I don’t think it should necessarily be torn down or replaced, but it should be amended” should read “I don’t think it’s a terrible building, and I don’t think it should be torn down: I think it should be improved. . . . That said, I think Dartmouth is pretty fortunate to have Murdough and the Choates as their potentially worst buildings.”
  • “I suppose the Fairchild center gets a lot of censure, and it is incongruous. But it is cool. And it was meant to be presentable. I don’t think it’s completely convincing. But at least it is presentable” should read “It is incongruous, but at the same time, when you look at it, you can tell . . . there was a sense of style there — there was a lot of skill put into it. It’s very cool and modern — cool in the sense of being refined, you know, the steel and glass, the thin skin. . .”
  • “You could make a good argument for making use of the Crosby house (which is the name of the older part), and getting rid of the rest; it makes good use of that space” should read “[Y]ou’ve got all that land south of the building, between Blunt and Parkhurst, basically a vacant lot. . . . . You could make a good argument for a building there that would use the old Crosby House (which is the old part of Blunt), get rid of the rest, and make much better use of that space.”
  • “Essentially it was built as a hotel, as part of the town” should read “[T]he Lodge . . . was built . . . effectively as part of the town, as a motel, and then used for a school purpose.”
  • “Wheelock set it out back in the 1730s” should read “It’s one of those things that Wheelock set out back in the early 1770s.”
  • “The only unfortunate thing is that it blocks access to the grad school . . . I think this is what lead Larsen to propose a large causeway to connect Thayer dining hall area with the graduate part of the campus” should read “The only unfortunate thing about it is that it kind of blocks easy access to the graduate schools. I think there was a plan by Larson in the 1920s that proposed a very long, high causeway or bridge that would have gone from Thayer Dining Hall, basically, across to the Engineering School.”
  • “Yes, I hope some of that area is preserved, in particular the buildings . . . should be preserved” should read “although I hope, certainly, that they preserve at least one of those if they do use their sites.”
  • “South Fairbanks being the first building designed and built by Charles Rich 1875” should read “He designed it in 1892 . . . [but] Beta , . . . did not build it until around 1903 [after the school had built several buildings designed by Rich].”

New buildings named

A press release on the names of the new dormitories includes two apparent firsts by Dartmouth: the first building, or part of a building, named for Samson Occom (Occom Commons in the McLaughlin Cluster) and the first building given someone’s first name or nickname: McLane Hall is still named for John Roy “Judge” McLane ’07, but it is switching to Judge Hall.

Hanover in Second Life

This month’s Wired calls out the digital model of Hanover’s Main Street as one of twenty sights to see in the online community Second Life.

A researcher at the Homeland Security-funded Institute for Security Technology Studies started the project as part of the Institute’s Synthetic Environments for Emergency Response Simulation (run by its ER3 Center).

The researcher later joined The Electric Sheep Company, which the Institute hired to build the model.

Satchmo Prototype has posted photos of the model, and Electric Sheep has 64 more photos.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link below fixed.]
[Update 11.30.2006: The Dartmouth has an article on Hanover in Second Life.]
[Update 09.24.2006: Post rewritten, Electric Sheep information added.]

Business education history

Writer Matthew Stewart responds to Tuck Dean Paul Danos’ letter in this month’s Atlantic by stating that “the Tuck School at Dartmouth was indeed founded first, as Paul Danos says; but Harvard was first to offer a master’s degree in business administration.”

This is a petty point, but it’s not clear how Stewart could be correct if he’s referring to the degree in lower-case letters: the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance was founded in 1900 and granted its first business master’s degree to Walter Blair and his two classmates in 1901. Harvard did not admit its first students until the fall of 1908.

No graduate degree in the administration of modern businesses existed in 1900. The Tuck School started by calling its degree the “Master of Science (Tuck School)” but renamed it during 1902 the “Master of Commercial Science,” a reference to the Bachelor of Commerce degree that many schools had been awarding for years. (Wayne Broehl, Tuck & Tucker (1999), 43-44.)

Harvard’s business school (which also might have begun by calling its degree the M.C.S.) did not seem to rename whatever graduate degree it was granting as a “Master of Business Administration” until 1921, and that’s the name that caught on. (Harvard probably did more than simply rename its existing degree — it probably invented a wholly-new curriculum that revolutionized business education; but Harvard did not open “the first graduate school in the country to offer a master’s degree in business” as Stewart stated in the original article last month.) In 1953, the Tuck School changed the name of the degree it had been awarding since 1901 to the conventional M.B.A.

[09.12.2006 update: reworded post, fixed typo.]