Category Archives: History

About general non-architectural aspects of Dartmouth College.

Toward a set of visual identity guidelines

Posted on by
Reply

When Dartmouth started its current fundraising campaign in 2001, it expanded its small institutional news service into a full-fledged public relations team under the new office of the Vice President for Public Affairs. The creation of this office was by all accounts an overdue development. In the meantime, students took matters into their own hands by creating Buzzflood; the Tuck School has become a world center for the study of marketing; and alumni have discussed school “branding” (Class of 1963 newsletter).

The PR Office and currently has five members, as described in a profile in PR Week [pdf] and has hired the Manhattan PR firm of Plesser Holland. The firm is experienced in drafting materials and managing reputation but does not claim to be a design shop that focuses on creating logotypes and related images.

The most notable recent step of Dartmouth’s PR Office is the welcome issuance of the Dartmouth Editorial Style Guide during December of 2005 by its Office of Publications. The Guide sets standards for the use of Dartmouth’s Seal (1773, engr. Nathaniel Hurd), its Shield (1940, W.A. Dwiggins, modified 1957), and the lesser-used White Pine from its Bicentennial Flag (1969). The Shield is properly rendered in black and white; the Seal is properly reserved for official uses. The Guide also mentions an odd little Baker Tower sketch that might fit better in a clip art collection. (More information on the history of some of these designs may be found in the Library Bulletin.)

Dartmouth does not yet have a comprehensive set of “visual identity guidelines,” a set of standards that would cover the images mentioned above as well as lay out appropriate uses of an official typeface and coat of arms. Some schools developing clear and comprehensive guidelines that include all of these elements are Brown, Cornell, Cambridge.

A coat of arms is a heraldic device that would exist alongside the Seal and Shield, and it is something the College needs. The most recent proposal for a coat of arms features Dartmouth Hall (unlike the above devices, which feature hypothetical buildings) and includes the school’s motto as well as a buck’s head from the arms of the Second Earl of Dartmouth.

Good proposal Dartmouth arms

Dr. Good’s proposed arms, in black and white

Because a heraldic coat of arms is by nature an adaptable arrangement of colored elements on a field, this design would be suitable for a much wider range of applications than the Shield, which is exclusively a black-and-white line drawing.

Following are some indications that a coat of arms is needed:

Shield as used by Trustees

This Shield uses colors other than black and white and incorporates an inappropriate drop shadow.

Digital Library Logotype

This shade of lavender (presumably derived from the face of Baker’s clocks) belongs in the palette, but this logotype makes the institutional subunit look more independent and important than the Tuck School.

Technology Transfer Office shield

The nonstandard logotype above diverges in size, font, arrangement, and color from the one the school should adopt; the Shield within it also is highly unorthodox. (Dr. Good also notes that it eliminates the Indians from Dartmouth’s Seal.)

Graduate Studies tree

This one uses an attractive but nonstandard version of the White Pine.

The point is not that the new guidelines, which would prevent most of the uses above, are being enforced insufficiently. The website of the Technology Transfer Office needs color in its graphic identification with Dartmouth. The point is that it is inappropriate to transform the Shield into some sort of color logo or coat of arms in graphic-design terms as well as heraldic ones, and that Dartmouth therefore needs a coat of arms, which may be rendered in color or black and white as well as abbreviated, with smaller elements standing for the whole.

The PR Office, as the manager of the school’s visual identity, is the proper body to request the official adoption of a coat of arms and to then specify its use in exactly these situations. The office is probably too busy at the moment, but if it ever commissions a set of visual identity guidelines from an outside firm, as the schools listed above have done, it should include a coat of arms in the specifications for the project. The variety of logotypes that Dartmouth needs (and already is trying to use) simply requires a coat of arms: a black-and-white line drawing from 1940, however traditional and useful in some situations, is far too limited for what Dartmouth requires.

[04.08.2006 altered slightly.]

Oxon. v. Dartmo.

Posted on by
Reply

In the wake of Britain’s education fees controversy, The Guardian has seized on the similarities between the endowments and enrollments of Dartmouth and Oxford to compare Dartmouth favorably to the English institution.

Dartmouth’s stadium, tiny in Ivy terms, comes out as peculiarly impressive in the article because it has enough seats for everyone…

Somehow it is hard to picture American football as seen from an English football terrace (see an image of Arsenal’s new stadium in the UAE, proof that terraces are not a result of budget constraints; terrace stories; terrace songs and chants).

The author of the Guardian piece might be shocked to learn that “enrollment” in the U.S. means total students, not just the entering class. That means that the comparison is even less valid: Dartmouth is less than one-quarter the size of Oxford’s 17,000 “enrollment.” There are dormitory clusters at Dartmouth that are larger than Oxford colleges.

[Update 12.12.2006: Enrollment information added.]

Some Web archeology: The Harold Parmington Foundation

Posted on by
Reply

The Harold Parmington Foundation, a fraternity that existed from 1972 to 1984 and had the most unusual fraternal symbol ever, lives on in a touching website that Dave Halpert has set up.

The site has several photos of the house (now owned by the College and occupied by Epsilon Kappa Theta) including photos of the meeting room, the basement and the pool room) as well as Carnival sculptures (for example, 1976) and composite photos (1976).

Thayer Hall demolition proposal

Posted on by
Reply

The D, talking to Dean Redman, has put a date on the Thayer Dining Hall demolition: it will come down by 2010. The article states that the school has not selected an architect for the replacement.

One might offer a thumbnail preservation plan for the school to undertake before demolishing the building:

  1. hire a Cultural Resource Management consultant to document the building to HABS standards. This is a widespread practice that has been conventional for decades in government;
  2. remove and preserve the painted leather wallcoverings from the Tyndall Lounge, the Robert Burns painting The Dartmouth College Case (1962) from the main dining room, and the murals Eleazar Wheelock (1937-1939) by noted American illustrator Walter Beach Humphrey from the Hovey Grill. This is a chance to get the controversial murals out of an everyday setting and into a gallery or storage (although it might be used as a reason to demolish them — it probably depends on how they were created);
  3. remove and preserve some notable architectural element, such as one of the roof trusses from the main dining hall. People have been suggesting for a hundred years that the school systematically collect architectural artifacts from the buildings it demolishes, and if there is no room for a permanent collection, some things from Thayer might at least go in the future dining hall.

Sphinx is first on the National Register

Posted on by
Reply

The Sphinx Tomb (William Butterfield, 1903) was listed on the National Register of Historic Places last March. It is the first building related to Dartmouth College or located in central Hanover to be listed. The only other building in Hanover Township to be listed so far is the Great Hollow Road Stone Arch Bridge over Mink Brook, which was listed in 1997.

1,500-foot wells drilled near Tuck Drive

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Medical School to be named

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The granite post on North Main

Posted on by
Reply

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.]

Article on Old Division Football posted

Posted on by
Reply

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.

The Gym’s stair

Posted on by
Reply

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.

Planning office renamed

Posted on by
Reply

Varied notes

Posted on by
Reply

Small updates:

  • Fred Wilson‘s new reinterpretation of the Hood’s collection opened on October 1.
  • The College has long considered serving beer in the future north campus dining hall.
  • The Dartmouth notes that work on the Gym continues and should end by April.
  • The Dartmouth notes that Chi Gamma Epsilon and Bones Gate have reopened after their
    building code renovations and additions.
  • Dartmouth Life has a roundup of current construction projects.   The links at the bottom are
    to unique articles rather than the Facilities Planning Projects Page.
  • The academic projects of Visual Arts Building architects Machado and Silvetti includes chiefly Princeton’s Scully Hall (1998) (more) and — more remarkably — a 1992 parking garage there.

Football history

Posted on by
Reply

Errata for the first page of the enjoyable Dartmouth College Football: Green Fields of Autumn by David Shribman and Jack DeGange (page 10):

  1. “Old Division,” later known as “Whole Division,” was Dartmouth’s distinctive football game in the mid-19th century.
    Should read:
    “Old Division,” later known as “Whole Division,” was Dartmouth’s distinctive soccer-style game by the mid-19th century.

  2. The “field,” originally the entire campus, was later narrowed to “the college yard,” now the Green.
    Should read:
    The field was the Green.

  3. The buildings in the background of this photograph (including the Church of Christ) that had not already been moved or replaced were relocated from the north end of the Green when Baker Library was built in the 1920s
    Should read:
    The houses in the background of this photograph were relocated from the north end of the Green before Baker Library was built in the 1920s, and the Church of Christ burned down in 1931.

The first and last notes are merely pickiness regarding imprecisions (though the implication that Old Division was related to American Football would be inaccurate). The second note deserves some clarification. The College Yard was and is east of the Green, between College Street and Dartmouth Hall. The “Campus,” of course, was what’s now called the Green.