The Class of 1978 shows another rendering of the Life Sciences Center. The Dartmouth states that demolition of the three buildings on the site has begun, and notes that workers will break ground in December.

The Life Sciences Building has a name: The Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center (press release; article in The Dartmouth). The only other Dartmouth building named for a class that comes to mind was named only last year, the Class of 1953 Dining Commons.

The class plans to raise $40 million of the roughly $95-million construction cost. The architecture firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, recently hired a few new designers in its Pittsburgh office to handle this project in particular.

The press release announcing the gift includes the first perspective renderings available, and they emphasize what appears to be an elliptical-plan glass stair tower. The long cross-bar will be the teaching portion of the building, and the shorter north-south wing will house the research spaces and administration.

[Updated 10.20.2007: “Building” changed to “Center” in first stentence.]

The latest Life Sciences Building plans have been posted. The site plan (pdf) is remarkable. The elevation (pdf) of the north facade shows how much lower this somewhat tall building will be than the existing Remsen-Vail.

The biggest news in the flood of recent announcements involves the Life Sciences Building. This undergraduate lab has been in the works for several years; it has always been clear that it must be near Gilman (the existing undergrad lab) and the adjacent Medical School, but the degree to which it would be shared by (or might even replace) parts of the Medical School has fluctuated.

The school has just announced that the building will not stand near Gilman on the site of the Modular Lab (1980s, “The Pizza Hut Building”) but will occupy the site of Strasenburgh Hall (originally a dormitory, designed by Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty, 1962-1963) and Butler Hall (the utilitarian bulding down the hill, 1964), and that the Modular Lab will still be done away with to expand the Medical School’s existing lawn.

The designer of the nearly-$100 million building is Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a firm that participated in the North Campus competition and has designed some of the most visible (and coolly, impossibly minimalist) Modernist architecture of the early twenty-first century: the Apple Stores of Tokyo (another image), Manhattan, and elsewhere.

The site plan indicates that the Life Sciences Building will not only stand near the Medical School, it will form an essential part of its campus. The Medical School’s ongoing half-departure from Hanover in favor of its suburban Lebanon campus and its decision not to claim a part of the Life Sciences Lab as originally proposed (now “the supporting systems will not need to accommodate the demands of other research sciences”) hint at a continuing Dartmouth takeover of the D.M.S. campus.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Fifth Avenue store gallery replaced.]

Back in May of 2005, the school mentioned that the Cambridge firm of Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Inc. was handling the conceptual design for the Life Sciences Building north of Gilman. The school presumably then sent that design to other firms for proposals to build the building itself.

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.