The Alumni Gym construction updates page has two construction photos. One photo shows the Michael Pool with the airy and astonishing arched steel roof trusses now exposed. It is difficult to believe that they were covered once.
More information on the St. Thomas project (earlier post): The addition was designed by architect Richard Monahon, Jr., of Peterborough, N.H., in association with Haynes & Garthwaite Architects of Norwich, Vt. Excellent Richard Frutchey photos accompany Jack DeGange’s article in Trumbull-Nelson’s Constructive Images (Fall 2003). Construction photos are found in T-N’s newsletter.
The Dartmouth‘s article on LEED certification at Dartmouth mentions that the College has drilled two 1,500-foot wells to cool the Tuck Mall Dormitory — it’s interesting to note that the dorm is within 100 yards of the first wells dug at the College, the unsuccessful ones Eleazar Wheelock dug when he was trying to set up a hamlet near what is now the rear of Butterfield Hall.
The MacLean Engineering Sciences Center was clad in brick during the fall and now presents a recognizable form. See construction photos.
The press release announcing the new energy-saving campaign features a retro sticker urging users to turn off the lights, but it does not mention the classical message that still may be found on worn switchplates throughout the College, “Vox Clamantis in the DARK.”
The long-planned Life Sciences building (“The Hanover Life Sciences Building,” i.e. not a building on the Medical School’s Lebanon campus) will enclose about 142,000 square feet, comprising four large classrooms, eight seminar rooms, eight teaching laboratories, and as many as thirty research labs. Although its mission as a joint College-Medical School facility makes it seem somewhat similar to Gilman, on the edge of the medical campus, preliminary maps are showing the new building somewhat north of the Modular Lab.
Less expensive than the chance to rename the Medical School is the chance to rename the main hall of Baker Library, at $10 million. The hall will be refurnished as a “Scholars’ Green,” a sort of slightly busy study room. Since the card catalogs were moved out, the place has seemed rather empty, and having something like another Tower Room would be nice. With Novack just downstairs, there would be no need to put in a screaming espresso machine.
General Sylvanus Thayer’s 1860s donation of $70,000 for a Thayer School of Architecture and Civil Engineering (1871) would be worth about $61.7 million today, after five percent annual compounding; Edward Tuck’s 1899-1929 donations for the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance (1900) would be worth about $121.4 million. It is harder to estimate how much the right to name the Dartmouth Medical School would be worth, since Dartmouth itself funded most of the cost of starting the institution in 1797 and has failed ever since to take advantage of the opportunity to name it for a benefactor. But now we know: the opportunity to name the Medical School is probably worth $150 million, which is the amount Dartmouth now seeks for that right, according to a Development Office brochure.
One wonders whether the school will be called the “[Name] Medical School” or shift to the “[Name] School of Medicine at Dartmouth College” to match the other two professional schools.
A granite post on North Main Street (visible to the left of the pickup in a Math Department photo) has been left up during the construction of the latest building adjacent to it, Kemeny Hall. The post appears to be the last surviving element of confectioner E.K. Smith’s 1868 house.
[Update 12.31.2006: construction photos showed the post lifted out of the ground, and photos of the completed Kemeny Hall do not show it.]
A somewhat disjointed article on Dartmouth’s local pre-soccer form of soccer, Old Division Football, has been posted.
The only information of any interest outside Dartmouth might be the conclusions, obvious enough but still not widely known, that:
1. The first soccer game in the world between two universities seems to have been the Princeton-Rutgers game of 1869. Oxford and Cambridge did not play until 1872. (The Football Association wrote the rules of “soccer” in 1863, and Rutgers was using those rules, possibly with slight variations.) The story that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American gridiron football game before rugby had arrived is so obviously incorrect that it is hard to imagine why it is still told, yet it is the official line at Rutgers. Back then, soccer was called “football” and allowed the use of the hands, just not running with the ball.
2. The first college football game in the U.S. was the McGill-Harvard rugby game of 1874. College football and pro football as we know them today are descendants of the rugby that McGill played. The first college football game between U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875. Princeton, Rutgers, and the other schools that had been playing soccer dropped it and switched to rugby. All American football is played under the rules of rugby as used by Harvard and Yale and modified by them and their later competitors during the succeeding decades.
This is historic preservation for the twenty-first century: a group has formed to recreate the first Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, which started in 1964 in the basement of College Hall on a GE-235 computer (used for executing programs) and a GE DN-30 (for communicating with the remote teletype terminals).
Dartmo. is experimenting with an RSS feed, linked from the top of the page. New posts will be given meaningful titles from now on.
Centerbrook’s new Varsity House has been approved by the Trustees, but the Biology Department’s building is still in planning (The Dartmouth | press release).
In a speech to the faculty on October 31, President Wright announced: “I think we can confidently say that there has never been as much construction at any one time in our history.” Below is an excerpt from his speech as it relates to each future building project, with speculation about the architects added. In the context of architecture as a world art form, the most important project is the first listed here; the project that is most important to the school is listed second:
The Howe Library has completed a major addition (The Dartmouth | Valley News) to its SBRA building. The addition was designed by Gerrit Zwart and built by Trumbull-Nelson.
Smith & Vansant Architects of Norwich have remodeled and added a new rear facade (2000) to the Robert Strong Memorial Building (1959) of the League of New Hampshire Craftsmen, across from the Hop.
Front (north) and side (west) facades of Strong Memorial
The Athletics website has an update on the Gym renovation. One of the photographs shows the upper drill hall, which the project will return to the industrial space it really is.
One of the first things the College did when it took over the Gym from the alumni was to add a central north stair to the eastern and western runs that already led to the main entrance. Now the school is replacing that narrow central run with a single broad main stair and substituting bicycle racks for the eastern run and a ramp for the western (see plan [pdf]). One expects that the ramp nevertheless will see the greatest use, since most people arrive from the west. The chunky cornerstone, laid by President Ernest Fox Nichols at his inauguration on October 14, 1909, may be obscured by the ramp.
