Category Archives: Cemetery

More observations about the final strategic master plan

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The college released the final (November 2020) version of the master plan (pdf) in July of 2021 (Anna Merriman, “Dartmouth master plan calls for growth along Lyme Road,” Valley News (2 July 2021)). The plan is not getting enough press or enough praise, so here are some observations:

  • As noted earlier, the possibilities for growth in the central campus look great (page 38).

  • The north end opportunity sites are all super. Old Hospital Quad will be an incredible space 130 years in the making (pages 42-43). Fairchild Tower always did seem more than necessary for its purpose; it is really a signpost building (pages 44-45).

  • Putting student housing in Remsen-Vail might be touchy. If you wanted to reuse a dull Sixties building as housing, you should have done it with the DHMC tower. Remsen-Vail could be appropriately used for academic purposes, however (page 44).

  • Lyme Road development is inevitable, but it is not clear how realistic it is to show such development without parking lots (pages 46-47).

  • When it comes to the West End, the novelty in this plan is the meander of the Cemetery Bridge (Thayer Viaduct). It is more like a boardwalk on a nature trail and does not appear to be a suspension bridge at all — but won’t it be extremely difficult to put bridge footings in a cemetery? (Pages 48-49).

  • More on the West End: Again, the original Tuck School building here could make an amazing undergraduate dormitory, but one would hate to see Tuck School vanish into the suburbs (pages 48-49).

  • South End and Downtown: The athletics promenade between Lebanon St. and Thompson Arena is excellent and long overdue. It could be a fine linear work of landscape architecture. Annexing Davis Varsity House as a part of the “house community” for the Crosby Street swing space dorm could be a superb move. The reasoning behind the focus on wellness for an expanded McKenzie is not clear — couldn’t it be used for anything, including arts uses? — but it makes no difference as long as the building is saved. McKenzie might present a real opportunity to create a new building within the historic brick walls (pages 52-53).

  • Quibbles are minor and basically the same as before: Thayer School didn’t go from the old Experiment Station directly to the West End in 1939, it spent several years in Bissell Gymnasium (page 9); the reference to “Dart Hall” is kind of irritating (page 38); and it’s “Bema” not BEMA (page 41).

  • The map on pages 28 and 29 showing named landscape opportunities is an important document. Some offhand proposals for these spaces:

    Name in Plan Proposed Replacement
    Riverfront Park Leydard Park
    West End Green A tough one; this was the Wigwam Circle postwar housing area.
    Tuck Green at the end of Tuck Mall Tuck Circle
    Dart Row Commons Fayer Green? “Commons” is not really appropriate for an open space.
    Maynard Yard Old Hospital Yard. This really is a better name.
    Life Sciences Lawn Another tough one; there is very little historic context here.
    North End Green in a strip of Dewey Field Dewey Field. Another one that really is a better name.
    Vox Lane NHCAMA; New Hampshire something; or State College something? “Vox Lane” has always been arbitrary, which is disappointing in this richly historic precinct.
    Park Street Gateway Piazza Nervi. This is tougher to justify now that grass rather than hardscape is proposed for this space.

Insignia

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Office of Communications, “Working Group Will Outline Best Practices for Iconography” (6 May 2021):

The Campus Iconography Working Group has begun work to draft recommendations for artwork, images, and nomenclature across Dartmouth’s physical and digital environments. The group, which includes students, faculty, staff, and alumni, will consider items such as paintings, sculptures, statues, and official insignia.

Contrast that project with the recent OCD overhaul of Dartmouth’s visual identity on an essentially graphical basis.

It seems likely that the group will recommend the retirement of Dartmouth’s 1944/1957 coat of arms, the familiar shield depicting a pair of Native Americans walking toward a college building (not Dartmouth Hall but a generic college or, at best, a Dartmouth Hall precursor).

Dartmouth's 1957 coat of arms

Jonathan Good’s Proposal for a Heraldic Coat of Arms for Dartmouth College anticipated this retirement decades ago and suggested an appropriate replacement.

It is important that Dartmouth, while retiring its current coat of arms, create a replacement coat of arms. There is a risk that the college will do nothing and that the D-Pine, a fine less-formal symbol particularly suited to athletics (notwithstanding its description by the Office of Communications as “the most formal brand mark”) will become the official symbol of Dartmouth College.

Any iconography decision will apparently not affect the naming of the Geisel School of Medicine (Inside Higher Ed).

Dartmouth NEXT, a sort of Great Issues for the world, uses the map (or really the pattern) of paths on the Green in a graphical way to form a right-pointing arrow logo:

Excerpt of Dartmouth NEXT logotype

A course exhibit from April 2020 titled The Indian Symbol at Dartmouth: A Story of Voices and Silence contains a number of notable documents from the archives. The 1932 article on “the new official insignia,” for example, is very interesting and brings to light an obscure design. One note: The Eleazar Wheelock Tombstone, which is carved (not stamped) with a version of the Indian head symbol, is actually a non-funerary monument located in Columbia, Connecticut. Wheelock is buried in Hanover, N.H.

Hilton Field as a sculpture park

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Here is a thought: What if, instead of calling for an arboretum on the former golf course, the master plan (see the post here) proposed to construct a large sculpture park? A sculpture park on Hilton Field, the part of the golf course that lies north of Occom Pond, would have little more impact on the neighbors than would an arboretum. It would be managed by the Hood Museum as a site for major new works, and it could provide a home for any refugee works that the college thought appropriate to move from the campus, such as Thel (see the article here; the master plan at least hints at the possible removal of Thel).

Speaking of Thel, here is William Blake’s new gravestone in Bunhill Fields Burial Ground in London. It was created by the Blake Society under the leadership of Philip Pullman, of His Dark Materials fame.

Photo of grave of William Blake in London by Scott Meacham

The Anonymous Hall bridge (see photos at the Windover Construction site) deserves praise for adding to the walkability of the northern part of the campus. It seems like the sort of amenity that could easily be cut from a construction budget.

Let’s hope the proposed cemetery bridge (see the final image at the BBB master plan project page for a conceptual view) eventually is built, and when it does cross the burial ground, let’s hope it receives an appropriate amount of design attention. What a fantastic project this could be, and what a great opportunity for an architectural commentary on the influence of ancient Egypt on both bridges and funerary architecture. See for example the post here for a proposal to erect an ominous cemetery gate at each end of the bridge.

Egyptian Revival architecture makes for a good folly; authors Gwyn Headley and Wim Meulenkamp have a new book out called The English Folly: The Edifice Complex. Their earlier book, Follies: A Guide to Rogue Architecture in England, Scotland and Wales, features a photo of the Dunmore Pineapple in Scotland (Wikipedia) on its cover. Yes, that Dunmore: the building’s patron, John Murray, was the Governor of Virginia at the beginning of the Revolution. On December 6, 1775, Murray wrote to (that) Lord Dartmouth to say that “I immediately ordered a Fort to be erected” at Great Bridge, on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp (pdf, 1311). The utilitarian and hastily-built timber stockade called Fort Murray was pretty much the opposite of a folly; it withstood a rebel siege but no longer exists.

A statue of Fred Harris? And other tidbits

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  • Sasaki Associates now has a page for its House Centers “pilot” program. This SCUP article has a “housing swarm” image that Sasaki created for Dartmouth. A Valley News article states that the college “estimated it will cost $12.8 million to build professors’ residences and temporary centers for Dartmouth’s Undergraduate House Communities program.” But those have already been built. Presumably that estimate refers to completed construction. Any future, permanent versions of those buildings will cost a lot more than $13 million.

  • BBB has updated its page on the campus master plan to include a large version of that plan, an image of the West End plan (Green to Blue), and — this is new — a schematic perspective rendering of the cemetery bridge, which we can call Fletcher Viaduct.

  • This Valley News article notes Kendal’s interest in building to the south on Rivercrest land and leaving the Chieftain land for recreation (rowing).

  • Sir John Soane’s Museum in London has a computer model of the museum on line.

  • The architects have completed a design for the Irving Institute (Valley News).

  • The Dartmouth has an article on the success of the Town fence in front of Collis in reducing jaywalking.

  • The Hood has a brochure on public art on campus. The Class of 1965 has proposed to erect a statue of DOC founder Fred Harris in front of Robinson Hall. The campus architecture committee is considering the idea, according to the ’65 newsletter.

  • A bit of biography on David Hooke, who’s at the center of the new Moosilauke Ravine Lodge.

  • Dartmouth will play Brown at football in Fenway Park on November 10, Big Green Alert reports. Wild.

  • The Rauner Library Blog has a post about the Charter.

  • Kresge Library in Fairchild has turned 40 years old.

  • This Times editorial contains footnotes. Kinda neat, but also showy: if footnotes are needed here, why not everywhere? Or if the paper is to be relied on generally, why include notes here?

  • Big Green Alert points out the new use of the Lone Pine logo by the Co-Op. First impression? The trad typeface clashes with the fat Modernism of the pine. The use of the athletics nickname BIG GREEN in this seal-like, college-wide institutional device is also weird.

  • A Proliferation of Canes. Photos of the most recent Commencement show students carrying many strange, new-ish canes, most presumably representing senior societies. They feature a snake wrapped around a Native American arrow; a bearded old man; the domed main body of Shattuck Observatory (clever!); a snake clutching an apple in its mouth; a huge phoenix (for Phoenix, obviously — is that cast resin or something?); a tail, perhaps belonging to a whale?; and a three-dimensional stylization of the stylized Lone Pine symbol (also a metal globe).

  • Two interesting new-ish concepts: literary geography and forensic architecture.

More on the viaduct

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This extension of Hanover’s historic street grid will carry Cemetery Lane across the Dartmouth Cemetery.

Generally

It is hard to resist calling it a bridge “to Thayer School.” If a Thayer parking deck ever goes in, visitors to campus will park there, and so this really will be a bridge “to the college.” The Thayer end of the viaduct will be the gateway to the college:

One could even imagine a brick tower, or a towering gate, at that spot, serving as both an entranceway and a landmark:

Old Town bridge tower, Prague, Meacham photo

Old Town bridge tower, Charles Bridge, Prague

Grove Street Cemetery gate, New Haven, Meacham photo

Grove Street Cemetery gate, New Haven, Ct.

The Egyptian mode would be especially appropriate here, since the viaduct crosses a cemetery and Dartmouth has a sort of Egyptian thing going on (Sphinx, the Brace Commons pyramid, Amarna). The college motto would be a good thing to put above the gateway, because the visitor will be entering a wilderness of sorts, up in the trees.

Then this will be the new welcome for visitors after they come through the cemetery:

Not bad, but obviously a back entrance at the moment.

The footings

The footings will probably be minimalist, even spidery, to avoid landing in graves. (Incidentally, do they have a plan for what to do when they find unmarked graves?)

If the footings are bulked up and built of masonry, they could really announce themselves and interact with existing monuments (see this article on graves under the bridge at Montmartre in Paris for an idea). The bridge piers could even be rendered as obelisks and given plaques or inscriptions — as cenotaphs — although that would become hokey very quickly.

The structure

The deck should be wide enough for bicyclists and pedestrians to pass. There might be a need for rules about bikes.

The designers could do a nice elegant truss, not just a set of steel girders like Bartlett Hall’s rear stair (Street View).
Could the school get a set of beautiful green trusses from a historic rail or highway bridge that is being replaced somewhere in the Northeast? The trusses could be placed end-to-end and the decks hung off the sides; this could be a little museum of engineering.

Or the viaduct could refer to the ski jump, built by the Boston Bridge Company: see this simple profile drawing, in a Rauner Blog post on the ski jump.

This does not seem like the place to use a state-park style boardwalk bridge. The site seems to demand something permanent and monumental in form if not in scale. It would be better to err on the side of the depressing than the cheerful.

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[Update 08.06.2016: It turns out that Robert Fletcher, who singlehandedly brought Gen. Thayer’s idea for a school into being (Lee Michaelides, “In the Beginning,” Dartmouth Engineer Magazine), is buried in the Cemetery.]