Category Archives: DHMC

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.

Dartmouth Unbuilding and other topics

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  • The smart brick rear ell of Wheelock House, a century-old two-story-above-basement book stacks addition built for the Howe Library, was demolished last month by the Eleazar Wheelock Society.

  • Commencement this year took place at Memorial Field for the first time since 1995. The stage was at the opposite end of the field this year. It would be interesting to learn whether the Commencement canopy is the same one that was first acquired for that 1995 ceremony and has been used every year since. Perhaps there have been different ones.

  • Frank J. Barrett’s new book is called Lost Hanover, New Hampshire (Amazon.com). Julia Robitaille has a Q and A with the author in The Dartmouth (2 July 2021).

  • The Dartmouth Indoor Practice Facility is now the Graham Indoor Practice Facility.

  • Photos of the CECS show it really taking shape. The Irving is also coming along. The Call to Lead has a page on new projects on campus that includes a West End video showing interior models of the two buildings (as well as close-ups of the globe finial following the removal of Baker’s weathervane).

  • DHMC Patient Tower, an appealingly midcentury hospital building by HDR (designers of The Williamson), is slated to stand at the north end of the hospital and join the main building between the bastions of the existing patient towers (Vermont Digger). The site is visible at the right of this iconic aerial.

  • At the trustees’ meeting in June, “[t]he board approved the expenditure of $2.89 million to advance designs for energy infrastructure projects and $1.65 million to support campus housing renewal design development. Board members also voted to allocate $6.9 million for information technology infrastructure work.”

  • The college website is being redesigned (Dartmouth News).

  • The IEEE has put up a plaque on the exterior of Collis (College Hall) to commemorate its importance as the site where BASIC was developed in the 1960s (Dartmouth News). The plaque would be better if it were actually written as a BASIC program, thus proving the simplicity of the language, but this is still good to see. (The BASIC highway marker, because of the limitations of the state’s marker program, is distant from the site where the event actually took place.)

  • Harvard Law School has replaced its old heraldic shield with a new shield in the form of a logo.

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[Update 09.13.2021: A reference to a “new” globe finial replacing the Baker weathervane has been corrected. The globe previously underpinned the weathervane and was left in place when the weathervane was removed.]

Various topics, including unbuilt buildings

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  • An article in The Dartmouth notes the completion of work on Reed and Baker and the start of work on Dartmouth Hall.

  • The HGA [architects] page for the CECS building has an image showing main entrance with the name KEMENY HARDENBERG above the door.

  • The Goody Clancy page on the Irving Institute is up.

  • What might have been: The central and right-hand groups of images on Samer Afifi’s site show (1) a more traditionally-massed CECS on the site where it is now being built and (2) a very unfortunately sited Irving Institute way back on the River Cluster site — not only distant from any important campus axis but also blocking any further Tuck School expansion.

  • This has been noted here before, but it is always fun to see: A Kliment/Halsband-designed addition to the Shower Towers to house Sudikoff. It looks perfectly pleasant, but it must have been overtaken by VSBA planning for Berry Row.

  • Kellogg Auditorium, perhaps the only building at Dartmouth named for a room, has been renamed Kellogg Hall and renovated as a classroom building. It opened last fall (Susan Green, “Newly Renovated and Renamed Kellogg Hall Opens” (29 September 2020)).

  • Dartmouth News has a piece on the importance of the DHMC parking lot as a social space in pandemic times.

  • Many outlets, including the Concord Monitor, have written about the huge college-affiliated apartment complex that will be built on Route 120 at Mt. Support Road.

  • The Davison Block, a prominent and historic commercial building at the top of Main Street in downtown Hanover, has been sold by the Davison family, reports the Valley News.

  • The Valley News also had an article on a sort of Christkindlmarkt that was set up in Hanover over the holidays. Fantastic. So many nice touches could be added to downtown, especially on South Main Street above Lebanon Street, whether by raising the street level (happening?), adding bollards, or limiting traffic and parking. An inviting town square could be delineated in front of the Municipal Building.

  • The Valley News reports on the college’s pullback from the idea of a new biomass heating plant. This is probably good news for the preservation of the old smokestack.

  • There are some great photos in the annual roundup of shots by Dartmouth photographers. The aerial of Baker Lawn does look like a De Stijl painting, as noted. It might look even more like a work in batik, an impression created by the imperfections in the edges of the paths and the snow-covered roofs.

The master plan: further reactions

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See the previous post on this topic.

The two locations of Geisel

The new-look Remsen/Vail at the north end of campus is an improvement and looks like the work of Leers Weinzapfel Architects, the designers of the reskinned Dana Library/Anonymous Hall adjacent (page 44 of the plan).

Remsen-Vail
If the Geisel School of Medicine were to relocate to new facilities, this opportunity for adaptive reuse can accommodate up to 550 undergraduate student beds and/or academic space, and could include new facade materials, enlarged windows, and a welcoming new entrance.

One might have no particular objection to the architecture but still recoil at the idea of placing undergrad beds or academic space this far away from the center. Undergraduate uses do not belong this far north. As a ten-year swing space allowing the rehabilitation of other dorms, perhaps, but it is just too far away.

The larger point here is that Geisel seems uncertain about its location. That the school is split between its traditional home here at the north end of campus (including its fancy admissions office in a renovated 19th century hospital ward) and its technical and efficient home alongside the suburban hospital south of town has always seemed strange. Students begin their education in Hanover and conclude it at the hospital in Lebanon.

Whether this split the result of intention or of nothing more than the lack of a replacement for Remsen/Vail at the DHMC campus, the plan suggests that Geisel could leave Hanover and make its DHMC site a true and complete med school campus. If that happens, it would be hard to argue that the vacated Geisel buildings in Hanover should not be used by Dartmouth (although a similar argument was successful in the past, when most of the hospital complex was demolished; VSBA had suggested that the Modernist main tower, at least, be renovated as a dormitory).

The proposals for a med school campus at the south end of the DHMC complex are so sensible as to raise the question of why they have not been built or at least planned already. A main building, some housing, and a modest green space for a medical school? Perhaps it is a measure of the committed suburbanity of the hospital complex that such a thing has not been accomplished thus far. The Geisel campus can grow as a grid of independent buildings flanking outdoor spaces rather than as the nucleus of a radiant sunburst of parking lots.

The Grand Limited-Access Road

New limited-access roadway for shuttles, emergency vehicles, and bicycles connecting Sachem Village and DHMC.

The transit link across the woods between Sachem Village and DHMC stands out as completely obvious and necessary, even to someone who knows the area only from maps.

Is the access limitation placed on the road because it goes through the residential neighborhood of Sachem Village? If there were some way to make it a proper road, it could take a lot of pressure off downtown Hanover. Yes, limited-access streets are pleasant and necessary — perhaps South Main Street above Lebanon Street? — but preventing this road from handling traffic seems cruel to Hanover.

The future has already arrived in the West End

Not much is novel here because there are two major buildings currently under construction. The rest of the area, while populated with buildings from the Sixties and Seventies, is still something of a blank slate. West End Green might be a bit vague (trees will do that) but it is an improvement.

Speaking of the Tuck School, it always seems to be threatening to leave:

In the future, the Tuck complex could be renovated and expanded to advance its competitive edge. Or, if relocated to new facilities, Woodbury and Chase, originally built as student housing, as well as Tuck Hall could be repurposed for undergraduate
housing, providing up to 230 beds.

Putting undergrad beds in the Tuck complex would be a neat trick, but moving Tuck out to some shiny, flimsy complex at an isolated forest site in Lebanon would be a blow to Dartmouth.

Does the college need to give a territorial guarantee to keep Tuck on campus, perhaps a promise of a portion of the future sites around West End Green and an access corridor or exclave on West Wheelock Street, a B-School Kaliningrad?

Minor points

  • What is the unlabeled property to the northwest on the map on page 5? It is the college-owned woods in Corinth, VT (see page 60).

  • The Covid-19 information in the master plan makes for a timely preface but already seems a bit dated in this 30-year plan.

  • “Gibson” is spelled “Givson” on an image on page 36.

  • “Hanover Campus” is inconsistently capitalized. The version with a lowercase “c” seems preferable.

  • Calling it “the College Park BEMA” is odd. There is no other Bema to confuse it with, so “the Bema” or “the Bema in College Park” would suffice. And “BEMA” does not need to be in all capital letters — the word “BEMA” in caps is a backronym (a back-formed acronym) for Big Empty Meeting Area, and as such makes a cute campus legend, but the Greek-derived word after which this space is named is “Bema.”

  • Is it strange to call it “Mount Moosilauke Ravine Lodge”? The mountain is Mt. Moosilauke and the lodge seems like it should be called the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge.

  • The map on page 9 showing new nodes hopping around campus is neat and insightful, but it could make its point even more strongly if it showed Thayer School’s time in Bissell Gym (on the Hop plaza, basically) from 1912 to 1939. And if the map substituted Geisel for MHMH, it could show three nodes instead of two: first the Medical School (on the Burke Lab site, from 1812 to the 1950s[?]), then MHMH, then the hospital complex in Lebanon.

Crosby Street dorm off the table and other news

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  • The construction of the Indoor Practice Facility is nearly finished (see Big Green Alert). The school’s existing indoor practice facility, Leverone Field House, is being eyed as a site for a temporary hospital ward during the pandemic (Valley News). The west wing of Alumni Gym is also under consideration (Valley News).
  • This interesting tidbit appeared at the end of a board news release about new trustees:

    The new board members were elected at the board’s spring meeting, held this year at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif.

    That seems like a first. The main news release (issued 1 March) has more information:

    The board met at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., where they engaged in wide-ranging conversations with a diverse group of Stanford leaders including trustees, the former and current presidents, the provost, faculty in leadership positions, and representatives from departments across campus.

    Not sure what to make of that, whether the learning opportunities were added to enhance the remote meeting or the meeting was held on the other side of the continent specifically in order to learn from Stanford.

  • Shattuck’s Revenge. At the Stanford meeting, the board approved a capital budget to fund projects that include “include renovation of Thornton Hall; planning and design of the Dartmouth Hall renovation; planning for proposed projects with private developers, including graduate housing and energy infrastructure; and” other projects. An interesting mention is made of $3 million “for planning and schematic design to explore the renovation and expansion of the Choates residence halls and the East Wheelock residential complex,” and funding for the future Hop renovation (still on the table!) and construction of teaching and research spaces is also noted. Not a word, however, on the Crosby Street dorm, which has been in planning for more than two years now. The project page for the design of the building was quietly removed from the Campus Services website during the last few weeks.
  • Irving Oil Co. has a rendering of the Irving Institute that differs in detail from the other images out there.
  • The college launched its capital campaign two years ago at Duggal Greenhouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Some photos from the event show considerable attention to detail: the use of Dartmouth Ruzicka lettering on the front facade; the model (15′ high?) of the bonfire, reimagined as a cocktail table; and the plaster/pasteboard renderings of Baker Tower and the main buildings of Tuck, Thayer, and Geisel (it’s white, but it’s a reasonably accurate rendition of the school’s ex-hospital building on Maynard Street).
  • Unrelated even to architecture: Although it is not unusual to hear of a company that has been operating since 1905, it is unusual to find one that has been making the same product since its beginning. How odd would it be if that product were a Morse code key? Take a look at Vibroplex and its Original Standard key. This is not quite an example of Ferry Porsche’s theory that the last car ever to be built will be a sports car (see Porsche’s site), because the FCC seems to effectively subsidize the use of Morse Code by prohibiting other modes of communication on certain radio frequencies, but it is close.

Another report from the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, five years on

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During 2014 this site noted the progress that Oxford University was making in its redevelopment of a large former hospital site in the north end of town. At the time, the site of the Blavatnik School of Government was a hole in the ground:


The building has since been finished:


The site before:


After:


As noted, the circle-in-a-square building has a remarkable precedent at Oxford, the Radcliffe Camera (indeed, the Camera is such a symbol of the university that the Blavatnik School uses the Camera rather than its own building as the main image on its website).
The former St. Paul’s Church at left is the Freud Cafe and Bar. It appears much as it did in 1994, albeit more overgrown (see also the 2014 post on chapels as libraries).

Hop expansion going ahead, and other news

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  • Nothing is left of Gilman but a hole in the ground (project update).

  • Well that was odd. The Valley News reports that the NewVistas Foundation plan for a 20,000-person new town in Vermont has been abandoned.

  • The Valley News reports on the decline of “WinCycle, the Windsor nonprofit that for 16 years has been taking discarded computers and electronic equipment from Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Dartmouth College, refurbishing it, and reselling the equipment[.]”

  • A lot of naming is going on. The Valley News reports on the DEN becoming the Magnuson Family Center, to be located in the new Thayer building; the Grad School has been named for Frank Guarini ’49 (Dartmouth News); and the college is offering a large donor the chance to rename the Norris Cotton Cancer Center (Valley News). It did always seem a little odd that the center was named for the legislator who wangled the federal funding to establish it.

  • The WRJ historic district is expanding to include an area that an architectural historian calls Little Italy (Valley News). The Polka Dot will be saved (Valley News).

  • The Hood staff are moving into the expanded museum, but the opening will not take place until 2019 (Dartmouth News).

  • Hey look! The Dartmouth 250 logo has gone from four fonts to one, and that one is Dartmouth Ruzicka: Dartmouth 250.

  • The Valley News reports that Nick Zwirblia has written a novel, The Bramford Chronicles, Book I: Johnny & Baby Jumbo. You might know Mr. Zwirblia better as the Happy Hop Guy.

  • Rauner had an exhibit on the history of the Ledyard Canoe Club.

  • The Valley News business magazine, Enterprise, has an article on the Grafton County Farm, a government operation that once might have been called a “poor farm.” Grafton County’s is still operating.

  • The capital campaign confirms in a general way some building projects:the Dartmouth Hall renovations; the Hood and Hop expansions and renovations, totaling $125m; and residence hall construction including 356 beds worth of dorms for $200m. There is no word on whether the Hop expansion will follow what seems to be a smart design from 2013 by Bora Architects. There is also talk of a request for a $50m endowment for the six house communities. One hopes that each house is endowed individually (starting at, say, $8m apiece) and is named by its benefactor.

  • The Dartmouth Hall renovation plan is based on an unusual pitch for funding by women (see Inside Higher Ed). More than a century ago, the college targeted the somewhat-arbitrary classification of Massachusetts alumni as a funding source for a new dormitory.

  • Several campus buildings are getting solar panels on their roofs (The Dartmouth).

  • There was a lot of news last April about the shuttering of UPNE, the University Press of New England (The Dartmouth, Inside Higher Ed, Valley News).

  • Students are working on a new historical accountability project that will focus on the role of slavery in Dartmouth’s founding and early history (Dartmouth News).

  • On Tuck Drive, “[c]onstruction also would add a sidewalk and bike lanes to the road, which is about 20-feet wide, Worden said” (Valley News). That is unfortunate. It’s hard to see how the historic granite curbing and guttering (not to mention the retaining walls) could be preserved if a sidewalk were added. Could the college use a row of poles to delineate a sidewalk on the existing asphalt surface? The fact that Italian immigrant labor gangs built that road by hand while living in huts nearby, probably on the site of the Boathouse parking lot, is still fascinating.

  • A corrected article on the Gilman and Dana work in the Valley News states that “Broemel said that plans for a north campus academic center during the 3-year tenure of then-Dartmouth President Jim Yong Kim had spurred discussion about the best use of the buildings, although Kim’s specific idea never came to fruition.” That point deserves more attention: Gilman and Dana were left vacant and available for the current redevelopment because the large North Campus Academic Center by Kyu Sung Woo Architects of Cambridge was meant to be built in their place. (Mr. Woo, incidentally, has a remarkable weekend house in Putney, Vermont.)

  • The Class of 67 Bunkhouse at Moosilauke has been completed (TimberHomes LLC).

Image of new Ledyard; selecting Ravine Lodge timbers

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Co-Op Food Store in Centerra

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11.28.2016 update: DEN project page link added.

Ledyard Canoe Club demo ahead

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  • A campus construction update has a few details on the soccer pavilion expansion out at Burnham Field.

  • The Valley News reports that the new Dartmouth Coach bus station is opening in Lebanon.

  • An architect has been named for the Ledyard Canoe Club replacement. The historic clubhouse will be demolished and a new building built in its place by Charney Architects of New Haven.

  • A newsletter last month described the installation of a solar array at ground level on Berry Row.

  • The Moosilauke Ravine Lodge replacement (project page) is going ahead, and one can’t help but worry about the success of its central feature, the great stone fireplace-staircase (HearthStair?). Will it be plausible as a work of masonry, a little bit of Machu Picchu in the White Mountains? Or will it read as Formstone, with no visible means of support?

  • An item on memorializing the Lodge mentions some interesting digital projects and quotes OPO Director Dan Nelson: “Memorabilia will be saved, safely stored, and reinstalled; interior log elements will be reused; timbers that can’t be reused in construction will be sawn into planks for wall paneling.”

  • “Work is underway … planning for future renovation of the Hopkins Center” (news release; see also the story in The D).

  • “Also in the future is consideration of the north end of campus, focusing on the demolition of Gilman Hall — and creation of green space in its place” (The D). Let’s hope that this is a way of saying the Gilman site will not become a parking lot.

  • “— coupled with the complete renovation of Dana Hall for faculty use” (The D). Interesting — wasn’t the library moved out because Dana was to be demolished? Is that move now looking like a mistake, or would the renovation have required the building to be emptied anyway? Whatever the case, it’s good to hear that Dana is being renovated. It seems like an underappreciated building that might have some merit to it, some endearing features. The small size and the scale of the building are appealing.

  • The Rauner Blog has a post on the Surveyor General of the His Majesty’s Woods during the 1740s. It is worth noting that John Wentworth later became Surveyor General, and Eleazar Wheelock was accused of illegally harvesting pines marked with the King’s broad arrow.

  • Dartmouth is building a timber-framed pavilion at the Organic Farm to shelter a wood-fired pizza oven (Planning Board minutes 6 September 2016 pdf).

  • Dartmouth Engineer Magazine has a long article on the Williamson Translational Research Building by The Map Thief author Michael Blanding.

  • The D has an article about the end of football game broadcasts on campus radio; this year the football team switched to 94.5 ESPN. Dartmouth licensed athletic multimedia rights to Learfield Sports late last year. Learfield created Big Green Sports Properties to handle “all corporate sponsorship endeavors for the Big Green, including venue signage, promotions, radio advertising and ads on DartmouthSports.com” (new general manager announcement).

  • Mad River Glen ski area in Vermont is the only ski area on the National Register (history, NR nomination form pdf).

History, buildings, etc.

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  • The Rauner blog has posts on Memorial Field, dorm room plans, fraternity meeting minutes, the WWI trenches around Leverone’s site, and class day clay pipes.

  • A Review interview with Thayer School’s Senior Associate Dean Ian Baker says:

    In addition to serving as the Associate Dean, Baker also chaired a community board overseeing and discussing the construction of a new building for the engineering school. The new building will be located next to MacLean where the parking lot is. “We have yet to figure out where the car park goes,” Baker mentioned, wryly suggesting that it was the only problem in the plan. Baker also serves on several academic boards for the school.

    The trustees approved a Thayer School parking garage on the Cummings Lot site back in February of 2002 (post).

  • An actual historic preservation campaign has sprung up at Dartmouth: Save Moosilauke.

  • The 65 Bunkhouse is finished, photos of the decication.

  • Nice black-and-white photos of Hanover architecture by Trevor Labarge are on line. The post office pediment looks quite grand, almost Londonesque.

  • The Hanover Conservancy is thinking about Kendal’s expansion onto the Chieftain property

  • The Valley News is covering the ongoing negotiations over construction of a palliative care center near DHMC and Boston Lot Lake.

  • The Williamson seems to be wrapping up (2014 press release, Turner Construction page).

  • ORW Landscape Architects and Planners of WRJ has been acquired by Greenman – Pedersen, Inc. of New York (pdf). ORW designed the recent improvements to the sidewalk and porte-cochere of the Inn (pdf).

  • The Norwich ad firm called Flannel created Dartmouth’s polished Strategic Plan website and others.

  • The story of how Glasgow football club Partick Thistle F.C. (Wiki) got its new mascot is almost as odd as the mascot itself.

  • Old Division Football (“the Usual Game”) seems a bit like the Florentine calcio storico (New York Times).

A black hole telescope; other news

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  • An earlier post here expressed concern about the plaque added to the Orozco Room after the National Historic Landmark listing. Dartmouth Digital Orozco depicts the plaque, a very dense text panel, on what it calls the “National Historic Landmark Pillar” near the center of the room. The other pillar is labeled “Manton Pillar” and bears the nice stone plaque created earlier.

  • CRREL site manager Larry Danyluk, paraphrased in the minutes of a Planning Board meeting:

    Expansions planned include another wing of offices, a new cold room and, in partnership with the Smithsonian, a radio telescope for black hole research. The telescope will be installed for 2-3 years, then moved to Greenland. Ten to twelve people will be added to staff the telescope project.1Planning Board, minutes of meeting (4 June 2014), pdf, 5.

  • The Dartmouth has an article on student-made graffiti, murals, and decorative painting in society buildings.

  • The renovation of Home 37 by ADD Inc. as the temporary location of Dana library gets a mention in Architect, the AIA magazine. ADD Inc. is the firm of Fred Kramer ’77 (DAM class notes).

  • Kresge Library is turning 40.

  • The Rauner Blog has a post on George Ticknor and the Ticknor Room.

  • The Times has a story on an interesting project at Brown, the recreation of part of a 19th-century natural history museum. Dartmouth also gave away much of its own collection, but a lot of it went to the Montshire Museum. One wonders whether enough dinosaur skeletons and mounted fauna remain there to supply a project in Wilson Hall like the one at Brown.

  • The Dew Construction Corp newsletter for June 2013 (pdf) mentions the Heater Road Medical Office Building and the Dana Library project.

  • The Class of 1974 Bunkhouse at Moosilauke (“the 74tress”), designed by MacLay Architects, has been completed, according to a post at TimberHomes LLC. The default construction mode at Moosilauke has shifted from log (or, in the case of the older bunkhouses, what seems to be conventional balloon framing) to substantial post-and-beam timber framing. If the Ravine Lodge ends up needing to be replaced, will its replacement even be a log building? What wonders could TimberHomes accomplish if it were given the once-in-a-lifetime project of erecting a Ravine Lodge to last 500 years?

  • A resident of the Lyme Road/Richmond School area, commenting at a recent neighborhood planning party:

    There should be a bridge between I-91 and DHMC. That would divert a lot of through traffic away from our neighborhood.2Planning Board, minutes of meeting (4 June 2014), pdf, 2.

  • Will the architects of the West Stands replacement incorporate any quotations into the new concrete terraces or pediments? Whose woods these are I think I know.

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References
↑1 Planning Board, minutes of meeting (4 June 2014), pdf, 5.
↑2 Planning Board, minutes of meeting (4 June 2014), pdf, 2.

Report from the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter

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Several posts here over the past few years have commented on the redevelopment of what’s called the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter in Oxford, comparing it to Hanover’s own hospital district north of Maynard.

Rafael Viñoly Architects devised a 2008 master plan for the area that appears in an aerial view before the makeover:

  • The Oxford University Press building is visible at the right, outside the quarter.
  • That church opposite the Press (St. Paul’s) was a coffee shop/bar called FREVD that served as an example here in the Rollins Chapel reuse post.
  • Just beyond the church is the future site of the building of the Blavatnik School of Government (founded 2010, Wikipedia). Circle-in-a-square buildings do have a special history here, but even a person with some fondness for spaceship buildings could find something to quibble with in this project by Herzog & de Meuron.

Oxford Blavatnik site Meacham photo

Blavatnik site, with St. Paul’s at left

Oxford Blavatnik site Meacham photo

View of construction site through hoarding

Oxford Blavatnik site Meacham photo

View of site from west: Templeton Green College, with Observatory

The broad approach taken by the university as developer is interesting: there was archeology beforehand (Neolithic ring ditches!) and during construction there was an artist in residence and a set of public art presentations.

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[Update 07.20.2014: View through hoarding added. Thanks to Hugin for panoramic image software.]

BASIC at 50 and other items

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  • Work continues on the Williamson Translational Research Building at the hospital in Lebanon. Here is a notable tidbit about the building’s namesake donor, the late Dr. Peter Williamson ’58: he once owned the ultimate collector car, Lord Rothschild’s Bugatti Atlantic. Williamson’s car won the Pebble Beach Concours in 2003 and is now in the Mullin Automotive Museum.

  • The Rauner Blog post on E.E. Just has a great old photo of Hallgarten. The building was built for the state ag school, known then as N.H.C.A.M.A., and its rear ell is the only part of any building from the campus to survive. The school later moved to Durham and became U.N.H., as its football website points out (via Big Green Alert). Of course, the most meaningful fact that relates to the football rivalry is that Dartmouth’s Memorial Field, indeed the entirety of its athletic complex west of Park Street, was built on one of the state farm fields. The students of the N.H.C.A.M.A. learned how to raise crops in the place where Dartmouth students now play football.

  • A group called Project VetCare is buying a house in Hanover, apparently around 65-75 Lebanon Street, to provide housing for veterans, including students (The Dartmouth).

  • Dartmouth Medicine has had a redesign by Bates Creative.

  • Wouldn’t it be interesting if the U.S. had national food appellations (Wikipedia) beyond the grape-growing regions designated by the AVA? There simply is no equivalent to the geographical indications and traditional specialities of the EU (PDO, PGI, TSG), the AOC of France, or the DOC of Italy. Not all traditional foods are old — Birmingham Balti has been proposed for the list of U.K. foods given protected status, and farmed Scottish salmon is already listed.

  • Kendal has demolished the Chieftain (Valley News).

  • Crouching Spider is going away (Flickr).

  • Dartmouth has talked about changing the name of the overall institution — the umbrella under which the undergraduate college and the graduate and professional schools operate — from Dartmouth College to Dartmouth University. The purpose would be to raise the school’s standing among observers, mostly outside the West, for whom “college” can mean a secondary school or lower school. A fascinating example of this renaming motive is found in Trinity College Dublin, another school that has landed outside the top 125 in the Times World University Rankings. Trinity was founded in 1592 (Wikipedia) as a constituent college of the University of Dublin. What makes Trinity odd is that the University never added any other colleges — Trinity is all there is, and yet the university administration survives, under its own name. Trinity’s rebranding now proposes to replace “Trinity College Dublin” with “Trinity College, University of Dublin.” Oh well; at least the “improved” name seems historically-grounded and technically accurate. Brian M. Lucey argues against it in a blog post, and another post. The real controversy in the rebranding involves the coat of arms:

  • Although the Irish Times claims that the Bible is being removed from Trinity’s arms, that does not necessarily appear to be the case. According to an informative paper by Professor John Scattergood (pdf, via Brian M. Lucey), the arms, as formally granted in 1901, require “a Bible closed, clasps to the dexter.” The rebranding includes a new, stylized version of the coat of arms that substitutes an open book, something that easily could be called “a Bible open.” Visually, neither one of the shields identifies the book to the ordinary observer. The changes in colors are all part of the stylization and do no violence to the underlying historic coat of arms. (The University of Dublin obtained its own arms in 1862, and they contain an open book, incidentally.)

  • UNH has picked a new logo, a shield designed by Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. This shield is not one of the three shields that the firm initially proposed last year (post). Although a couple of those first ideas were intriguing, students and alumni were not pleased. The new identity guide (pdf) notes that “The specific blue color has been made a bit brighter than the past version.”

  • Just for your information, the maximum number of effective footnotes in a Word document (Word:Mac 2008) is 32,768. Notes above that number fail gracefully: they still work but are numbered incorrectly, all sharing either the number 32768 or one of a few numbers after that.

  • The school’s Flickr feed has a nice set of historic photos titled “BASIC at 50: The Democratization of Computing.” It is especially gratifying to see the buildings identified: the College Hall basement, Kiewit, and so on. (In the lower right corner of another view of Kiewit is a glimpse of someone who could have been a predecessor of Usenet celebrity and campus character Ludwig Plutonium.)

  • This fantastic photo of President Kemeny with his BASIC license plate was taken in the parking lot east of Bradley/Gerry, it appears, and has the rear addition of the Church of Christ for a backdrop (somewhat near this present-day Google Street View).

  • From an article in The Dartmouth on planning VP Lisa Hogarty: “The biggest change in the College’s capital budget, she said, will come from the proposed expansion to the Thayer School of Engineering.” See the sample master plans of Koetter Kim (post) and Beyer Blinder Belle (post) and the Thayer press release on President Hanlon’s 2013 expansion announcement.

  • The news that a family had donated $100m to support Hanlon initiatives makes one think of the Harkness gifts to create “residential colleges” at Harvard and later Yale, but reading The Dartmouth, one learns:

    Mastanduno said this gift represents a significant departure from past donations, which have tended to focus on capital infrastructure.

    “This isn’t about bricks and mortar,” he said. “It’s about the core academic mission of Dartmouth.”

—–
[Update 04.17.2014: Broken link to Mullin removed, Kendal spelling corrected.]

Wintry aerials, etc.

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  • The design of the Black VAC landscape, including the Arts Plaza, was by Richard Burck Associates, the Boston-area firm that designed Berry Row. The project manager was Lisa Giersbach.

  • An article on the Williamson Translational Research Building in Dartmouth Medicine (Spring 2013) includes this exchange with Geisel School Senior Associate Dean for Research Duane Compton:

    DM: Plans for a translational research building began several years ago. What makes this the right time to move forward with this project?

    COMPTON: In 2007, Dr. Peter Williamson and his wife, Susan, made a landmark gift commitment to support the construction of a translational research building for the medical school. A year later, the economy collapsed and nearly all Dartmouth College building plans were put on hold, including the Williamson Building. Now, with the stronger economy, fundraising momentum growing, and the need for additional research space intensifying, it’s imperative that we move forward with the building.

  • Is Fairchild getting a deck? The floorplan provided as part of the Fairchild renovation project page shows what appears to be a plank-floored deck with tables on the College Street side of the building.


    Google Street View of Fairchild.

  • Dartmouth Engineer Magazine (March 2013) has an article on the Advanced Surgery Center at DHMC, an extension of an existing wing of the complex.

  • This site keeps harping on the need to preserve and reuse the Heating Plant. For an elegant reuse of a powerplant as a college library, see Moore Ruble Yudell’s U.W. Tacoma project. An 1875 waterworks building in Bonn, Germany was renovated in 1986 to serve as the Plenary Chamber of the Bundestag (photo gallery). And on a different scale, G.G. Scott’s 1947 and 1963 Bankside Power Station was rehabbed in 2000 by Herzog & de Meuron as the Tate Modern (Wikipedia; Louise Bourgeois, sculptor of Crouching Spider, was the first artist to have work commissioned for the Turbine Hall). Dartmouth’s smokestack, although only about a half-century old, must be retained as part of the complex, especially in an environment of few spires. Yale’s master plan devotes one map to locating “major vertical objects” on the campus (pdf, page 94).

  • I didn’t know that Tuck is offering a dual-degree program (Master of Environmental Law and Policy/Master of Business Administration) with Vermont Law School (VLS pdf).

  • Congratulations to the football team on an excellent conclusion to the season in the Princeton game (see this photo of the snowy evening in The Woods). The coverage on WDCR on line was enjoyable. For some reason, however, DartmouthSports.com still depends on Flash for much of its free live content. A hint: Adobe announced that it would stop developing mobile Flash more than two years ago, and Flash has never worked on iOS devices.

  • Boora’s design for the Hop renovation, according to the website, will include “a series of transparent boxes that penetrate the opaque modern exterior at entry points.” The article in The Dartmouth also mentions eliminating confusion in navigation “by changing the entryway structures.” Could these additions include a new street-level front entry pavilion located between the Inn and the Moore Theater (the iconic Hop facade)? This remarkable photo from Aerial Design shows the site, with the recent Grand Ballroom box and its depressed entrance to the Hop visible behind the reduced Zahm Garden.

  • Aerial Design has a number of excellent photos taken after a snowfall during December of 2012. The streets are uniformly free of snow and look almost like chilly canals in some of the images: the VAC, the Hop, and downtown; the south end of the Green and town; east along Lebanon Street to Memorial Field; and eastward across the campus from Tuck Mall.

  • Did you know that the New Hampshire legislature gave degree-granting authority to a for-profit university with its main administrative office in Concord and its campus in a 16th-century castle near Turin? St. John International University is having problems according to Inside Higher Ed.

Google updates its aerial, and other news

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NCAC now unlikely to come to pass

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The Dartmouth reports again, this time with conviction, that the NCAC project as we know it is stalled. It seems as if it might have been effectively cancelled.

Bertaux + Iwerks Architects present an interesting might-have-been, a pre-NCAC design for a new central DMS building. The design would have given DMS a new signature structure and knitted together the existing campus by connecting Vail to Dana and the Life Sciences Center.

It is hard to tell whether this design would have been any more successful as a work of urbanism than the NCAC design, for all its faults. Then again, the NCAC had more space to play with, enjoying the removal of both Dana and Gilman.

Triangle House project begins, other items

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  • The Dartmouth reports that work has begun on the extensive renovation of the apartment house at 4 North Park Street, to be known as Triangle House.
  • College Photographer Eli Burakian has posted some superb aerials of Baker and the Green. The latter image shows downtown Hanover and in the distance the hospital, the smokestack of each communicating with the other as if these were The Only Two Places in the World. See also the Mt. Moosilauke panorama.
  • Stantec notes that it worked on Dartmouth’s master plan. One assumes that this was a prior plan, but since the site also lists the recent Dartmouth Row programming study, it’s not clear.
  • Bertaux + Iwerks Architects has info on the 2005 SBRA master plan for DHMC.
  • A new film on the Densmore Brick Company was shown at AVA Gallery; see also the Valley News story and this depressing Bing aerial. From AVA Gallery:

    Lebanon’s Densmore Brick Factory, which closed in 1976 after 170 years of production, made the bricks that contributed to the built environment of the Upper Valley, including much of Dartmouth College.

  • The field-side view of Davis Varsity House is improved by the removal of the scoreboard, Bruce Wood points out (Big Green Alert blog).
  • The Rauner blog has an interesting post on the correspondence between Samson Occom and Phillis Wheatley (Wikipedia).
  • The Band’s new uniforms look good (see Flickr photo). They are more “Ivy” and expensive-looking than the previous plain green blazers over white pants. Black seems to be replacing white as the accent color accompanying Dartmouth Green these days.
  • A July article in the New York Times told of Yale’s efforts to protect its name against a “Yale Academy.” As an aside, I found Yale’s recent presidential inauguration inspiring. After the ceremony the band, wearing academic gowns, led the procession up Hillhouse Avenue, where the president passed beneath a balloon arch and halted in the middle of the street between two lines of student singers. The music stopped and everyone sang Bright College Years. Fantastic. The day before, a dean carrying a yale’s head (Wikipedia) on a staff had led a dog parade around Cross Campus (New Haven Register).
  • Better than having a hockey game at Fenway Park, Virginia Tech and Tennessee will play a football game at the Bristol Motor Speedway, a Nascar track (Richmond Times Dispatch).

The Wilson Hall Elm has fallen

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The Alumni Office’s twitter account has a photo of the huge elm tree on the ground in front of the Hood Museum. The Valley News reports that the tree struck Wilson as it fell, but it sounds like the damage is minor.

On the bright side, this frees up Tod Williams and Billie Tsien as they redesign Wilson’s entrance.

Other items:

  • The Hanover Crew’s boathouse is being built.
  • ORW designed the landscape for the Williamson Building at DHMC and has some nice images of the design.
  • ORW also has put up a project page for the transit hub in front of the Hop. The original design included a little heated pavilion.
  • The conceptual design for Boora’s Hopkins Center renovation was completed during Spring 2013 (OPD&PM).