What happened to Sasaki’s Crosby St. dorm?

Posted on 27.01.2022 by Regisseur

Sunday’s post asked what happened to the “swing space” dorm proposed for Crosby Street. Professor Nyhan, quoted in an article in The Dartmouth,¹Parker O’Hara, “New undergraduate housing on Lyme Road to break ground by end of year,” The Dartmouth (25 Jan. 2022), available at https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2022/01/new-undergraduate-housing-on-lyme-road-to-break-ground-by-end-of-year. pointed out the availability of the Crosby Street site. Now Ben Korkowski of The D has an explanation, quoting V.P. for institutional projects Josh Keniston:

“It is a tough site to build on: There is a steam line that runs through it, the Onion and tennis courts are there and it is a relatively tight space,” Keniston explained.²Ben Korkowski, “New residence hall set to replace the Onion placed on indefinite suspension,” The Dartmouth (27 Jan. 2022), available at https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2022/01/new-residence-hall-set-to-replace-the-onion-placed-on-indefinite-suspension.

The housing crunch of the moment does seem to have a lot to do with the long-term decision to throw up a hasty plastic dorm off campus.

Let’s say the Crosby Street swing space takes two years longer to build than the school-bus dorm on Garipay Fields will take. Wouldn’t it be better to put up some Tree Houses in Maynard Yard and on the Gilman site for a few years while building on Crosby Street and then end up with a real, permanent brick dormitory at the center of campus?

 [+]

References
↑1	Parker O’Hara, “New undergraduate housing on Lyme Road to break ground by end of year,” The Dartmouth (25 Jan. 2022), available at https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2022/01/new-undergraduate-housing-on-lyme-road-to-break-ground-by-end-of-year.
↑2	Ben Korkowski, “New residence hall set to replace the Onion placed on indefinite suspension,” The Dartmouth (27 Jan. 2022), available at https://www.thedartmouth.com/article/2022/01/new-residence-hall-set-to-replace-the-onion-placed-on-indefinite-suspension.

College planning dorms in the back of beyond

Posted on 23.01.2022 by Regisseur

The planning effort for the Lyme Road South precinct now has its own project page and has a serious team behind it:

Project Manager: Joanna Whitcomb
Planner/Architect: Beyer Blinder Belle
Landscape Architect: Michael Van Volkenburgh Associates
Environmental Design Consultant: Atelier Ten

The planners have sent out a Dear Neighbors newsletter (pdf) letting the neighbors know that a dormitory cluster — a group of “apartment-style” residences for 300 students, presumably seniors — is planned for their area.

Included in the college’s report of last Thursday’s community meeting is a map showing the site of the proposed cluster. The site is south of or upon Garipay Fields, southwest of the Rugby Club and presumably encompassing the driving range of the old HCC Practice Area:

That site is much further away from campus than, say, the Dewey Field Parking Lot, itself a barely acceptable site for a remote new dorm.

Google Maps says it takes 20 minutes to walk from Baker Library to the driving range south of Garipay Fields.

The proposed dorms will be used as swing space during a period of at least 10 years as existing dormitories on campus are renovated. After those renovations are complete, one hopes that the college will turn over the apartments to graduate students rather than expanding undergraduate enrollment to fit the available housing. Perhaps that ability (and commitment?) to abandon the dorm after its use by undergrads is the only thing that could make the plan acceptable.

Taking a piecemeal approach to the expansion of existing dorms (mentioned in this post) would certainly be better for the campus than erecting a distant, school-bus dependent cluster on Lyme Road. Even building a single 300-bed swing space cluster at the corner of Maynard and Rope Ferry would seem far superior to the Lyme Road idea. Once the 10-year renovation project is completed, that swing space can become a combination of offices and graduate student housing — just as Chase and Woodbury Halls at Tuck and 37 Dewey Field Road were all converted from housing to offices. (And whatever happened to the “swing space” dorm proposed for Crosby Street? Wouldn’t it obviate the need for the Lyme Road project?)

It seems that folks are in a hurry, and a grassy, vacant site allows for hastier construction.

——————-

Update 01.24.2022: The Valley News has an article on neighborhood opposition.

Dorms on Lyme Road?

Posted on 28.11.2021 by Regisseur

Dartmouth News and the Valley News report on the college’s interest in developing the land north of the Life Sciences Building, including parts of the golf course. The possibility of such development was spelled out in the master plan some time ago, but the noteworthy new detail is that the college is considering building dormitories on some part of the site.

First reaction to the dorm idea: This is an unserious proposal, a negotiating tactic, like the College Park dorm idea. It is a silly idea. The ten-minute walking radius from Baker is not just a guideline, it is a crucial rule of campus composition. Plans for transit do not eliminate the ten-minute walking radius, and it just does not seem appropriate to have students riding the school bus to class in a place as small as Hanover.

After a closer look: From Baker Library to the Dewey Field parking lot site might be a half-mile and take nine minutes to reach on foot, making it technically acceptable. It is about as far away as the River Cluster was — not an admirable standard, but a Dartmouth precedent. One hopes that the Dewey Field site is the only one they are talking about for a dorm, because any site beyond it would be unacceptable.

(What about the college-related buildings that are not part of the everyday life of students or faculty? Storage libraries and development offices and various back-office functions would be perfect for the golf course sites. They would be much better sited here than in the sprawl of Centerra or in towns around the region.)

If not on Lyme Road, where could the increasing number of students be housed? (The proposed Crosby Street dorm will be ignored, because it will be used as swing space to house students from existing clusters as they are renovated.) Here are some available sites, some of them identified in the current master plan:

A second Mass Row
The Gilman site (offered in the College Park dorm siting discussion)
The Maynard and Rope Ferry corner (or any site on any side of Maynard Yard)

Might it be the case that the number of additional students to be housed, say 350 students, would be too large to fit on one of those sites? Yes. That is a good thing, both for Hanover’s urbanism and for the students who end up living in the new hall. Instead of building a giant barracks, the school should add additional beds to the existing campus at a combination of smaller sites within the ten-minute walking radius, including:

Additions to and eventual replacement of the Choates
An addition to Wheeler Hall
A dormitory range on the outer edge of College Park between RipWoodSmith and Andres
A dormitory range west or north of McLane Hall

Obviously these new additions will have to join existing house communities; there is nothing wrong with that. Creating a subtle and sensitive series of additions to historic buildings will be more expensive than dropping a single giant complex on a distant lot, but it will be worth it. It seems that the desire to add beds to the campus exclusively in the form of one entirely new house community at a time is driving the push to build dorms outside of town, and it is harmful.

More observations about the final strategic master plan

Posted on 14.09.2021 by Regisseur

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.

College to build large new dorm next to gym

Posted on 22.09.2018 by Regisseur

As a site for the new dormitory (see the site search project page), the college has picked the corner of Crosby and East Wheelock Streets (Valley News). That was the arguably the best location of the three in contention, and it was the only one that campus master plans had previously designated for residential use.

The architect for the site selection is Sasaki, and that firm also seems to be the one signed up to design the new dormitory. One might predict that folks will be upset when they see the designs for a massive five-story, flat-roofed Modernist building between Alumni Gymnasium and Topliff Hall. For background, Sasaki designed Maria Hall at Regis College in Weston, Mass., the Wolf Ridge Apartments at N.C. State, and of course the temporary “house center” social buildings at Dartmouth.

The college presents the three dorm sites

Posted on 18.08.2018 by Regisseur

The college has been giving presentations (Valley News article) on the potential sites for a proposed 350-bed dorm. An initial list of four sites was reduced to three when College Park was dropped as a site for even this smaller version of the dorm. The three remaining sites are the former site of Gilman, the current site of Dragon on College Street, and the current site of the tennis courts and the Onion on Crosby Street at East Wheelock.

The suggestion on this site that scattering a few smaller additions around campus would be preferable to erecting a single 350-bed dormitory was based on the assumption that such a large building could not comfortably be shoehorned into a site as small as that on Crosby Street. Considering the fact that the entire McLaughlin cluster only contains 341 beds and has a footprint that is much too large to fit next to Alumni Gym, this assumption does not seem unreasonable.

The reason the college gives for the 350-bed number is the desire to use this swing space dorm to house an entire “house community” at a time. Fair enough — that is what Princeton did when it built Scully and Bloomberg Halls, initially planning the buildings to house a rotating cast of residents of other residential colleges as their own buildings were being renovated.

Adhering to the 350-bed goal will require all of the proposed buildings at Dartmouth to stand four and five stories high, and the Crosby Street site will require a building that stands five-and-a-half stories high.

At any rate, Sasaki (presumably) created a site plan and a massing study for each site and had Boston-area designer Dongik Lee draw up two perspective views of each potential building. These are nicely done and show the same style of building in each location. They are introduced with the caveat that they are not actual building proposals but are for illustration only.

Gilman and to a lesser extent College Street make sense as sites for some future building, but they do seem the lesser of the three sites for a new dormitory. College Street in particular begs to be left as forest or to become a site for an addition to Burke, part of a unified science complex 120 years in the making. (And constructing a building on College Street would bump off the Dragon Hall for at least the third time).

The Crosby Street proposal, called “the Question Mark” because of its shape, seems the most popular among audience members. It is nearer to dining areas and has a site that is not more suitable for some other use.

The site has indeed long been reserved for residential use — the 1998 master plan (pdf p. 19) states that “[a]t five stories, two residences on this site could accommodate 200 beds. Social and study spaces could be added to serve Topliff and New Hampshire [H]alls, too.” Interestingly, the 2001 plan and its 2002 update (pdf p. 12) would allow only 160 beds here.

Mills dorm site presentation slide 24 concept image Crosby site

Concept image of Crosby Street dorm from EVP Rick Mills presentation 16 August 2018

A dormitory on Crosby Street could make nice companion to Topliff, which was the giant dorm of its own era. One hopes, however, that the building could be given a footprint that is large enough — and that extends far enough to the south — to reduce its height somewhat. The driveway to Alumni Gym could be realigned to the south, and Davis Varsity House could be moved to face Lebanon Street as part of Larson Square, giving the new dorm more space in which to spread out. And this is completely unrealistic, at least until a Southern Bypass is built, but wouldn’t it be nice if Crosby Street could be partially or completely closed to traffic? That would be one way to make more space.

College asking for input on siting the new dorms

Posted on 15.08.2018 by Regisseur

The college is holding informational sessions in Filene to air some potential sites for a large, 350-bed dormitory cluster (Dartmouth News). “Following the three sessions, administrators will select a preferred site and begin the design and evaluation phase of work.”

There is no word on how many sites will be on the menu. According to the Valley News, “[t]he college has not said publicly what sites are being considered, but spokeswoman Diana Lawrence on Monday said they are all on campus and will be announced at the meetings” (Valley News). One would not have thought it necessary to state that all of the sites are on campus, but this is going to be a huge group of buildings, likely larger than the McLaughlin Cluster.

The need for many new beds is difficult to dispute, especially if the Choates and the River are to be replaced. But the programmatic case for putting all the beds on one site, as opposed to splitting them among four or five buildings or additions to existing dorms, has yet to be made. The college could be letting the goal of efficiency of construction management on a single site get in the way of good campus planning. And the misguided effort to keep everything together is also likely to encourage unnecessary demolition.

Here is a very rough alternative suggestion of a few of the potential sites for dormitories of a reasonable size (basemap pdf):

August 2018 sketch map of some potential dorm sites

Hop expansion going ahead, and other news

Posted on 01.07.2018 by Regisseur

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).

Gigantic College Park dorm dropped; large dorm planned somewhere

Posted on 04.03.2018 by Regisseur

The college has dropped the idea of building a gigantic 750-bed dormitory complex in College Park (Valley News).

In its place, and not necessarily anywhere other than inside College Park, the college is planning to build a very large 350-bed dormitory complex, larger than the East Wheelock Cluster (Dartmouth News).

Trustees approved exploratory work on concepts and designs for a new 350-bed residential complex that will allow existing residential stock to be taken offline for renovation and renewal. Exploration of locations for the new residential space is included in the conceptual work.

Sasaki is no doubt conducting the work.

New visual identity guidelines, Dartmouth Ruzicka typeface

Posted on 16.02.2018 by Regisseur

The college has revealed its new branding strategy (pdf), devised by Original Champions of Design (see news from the Office of Communications, Dartmouth News, The Dartmouth, and Brand New).

The strategy is the largest part of a new identity push that is described in “Telling Our Story” (pdf).

The new identity replaces the mild revamp described in the 2014 brand style guide (pdf). A September 2016 tweet by OCD at Rauner gave a hint that something was up and shows the depth of the firm’s interest in history. (And it’s possible that the image of the commemorative tile on page 50 came from this post; see also this 2013 post encouraging the mining of college history.)

From Dartmouth News:

The new graphic elements include four key items: a Dartmouth wordmark, which is the typographic treatment of the Dartmouth name; a custom-made typeface; a redesigned “lone pine”; and an icon that combines the lone pine with the letter D. Additionally, there is a new palette of colors to complement the traditional Dartmouth Green color, as well as new icons for use in social media, all of which will better communicate the Dartmouth identity, says Anderson.

The typeface is by Jesse Ragan (creator of RudolphRuzicka.com) and is based on the type that Ruzicka designed for use on the Bicentennial plaque, in the Zahm Garden outside Paddock Music Library), and the later Dartmouth Medal. (It is not to be confused with Dartmouth’s other 1969 typeface, the one that was designed by Will Carter and Paul Hayden Duensing and was revived recently for the Inn’s own rebranding.)

Like the typeface, the “D-Pine” mark is a nostalgic call to the early 1970s. It has a pleasing retro-kitsch character and makes one think of orange down vests, canned beer, and what are now called trucker hats. It would make an excellent athletics mark.

The use of the Versailles-like map of the paths on the Green as one of the four suggested patterns picks up an idea from the Year of the Arts (style guide).

And now we have an explanation of the origin of the seal-like House emblems (post, post): “The firm [OCD] also worked with the house communities last year to design a set of [insignia] with a unified design language, which debuted last fall, Anderson said.”

—–

[Update 02.18.2018:]

It’s true that the D-Pine, as fine as it might be, does not make an adequate replacement for Dartmouth’s midcentury shield. Perhaps the chart should look something like this?

A petition to save College Park and Shattuck Observatory

Posted on 17.12.2017 by Regisseur

The Friends of College Park and Shattuck Observatory have a petition you can sign to register your opposition to the removal of the observatory and the construction of a dormitory complex in the park. There is a fascinating history of the observatory as well.

But signs are not good. Back in September, the project page listed an upcoming milestone:

November: Review conceptual design results with Board of Trustees. If results are favorable, request Trustee approval to proceed with next phase of Schematic Design.

The Trustees do not seem to have publicly announced their reaction. But the results are obviously favorable, since now the project page says:

March 2018: Review conceptual design results with Board of Trustees. Subsequent project steps are TBD.

This plan must be pretty fantastic if it can convince otherwise rational people that it is worth pursuing. But not apparently so great that it can withstand public scrutiny.

One wishes the planners would at least say why they cannot build four or five well-sited new dorms in established clusters. Allowing that 750 beds are needed, why do they have to be all together? Are the economies of scale so great (or the school’s finances so poor) that the college cannot afford to separate the buildings? Or is it that the only proper building sites are reserved for other buildings whose planning the college does not yet want to acknowledge?

The dorms in College Park could very well end up looking like Sasaki’s Wolf Ridge Apartments at N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C.:

That’s some perfectly adequate flat-roofed university housing, built on a ridge.

Insignia for house communities emerging

Posted on 17.11.2017 by Regisseur

The first examples of house insignia are being released. They follow the graphical guidelines set out by the college (pdf).

The “house community” on the Hitchcock Estate, known at the moment as West House, has offered its official symbol: an elm tree. The symbol is used in action a few times in a recent Westletter (pdf). The elm refers to but does not depict the wonderful elm in front of Butterfield Hall. (That tree might have been planted by professor/trustee Henry Fairbanks, who built his mansion where Russell Sage now stands in 1864.)

Next we have East Wheelock House, a cluster that was still known as “the New Dorms” during the mid-nineties. One of its constituent buildings, Morton Hall, was damaged in a fire about a year ago and has been gutted and remodeled by the college. Thus the East Wheelock emblem is a phoenix. No relation is intended to the Phoenix Senior Society, a 35-year old Dartmouth women’s society. (The Phoenix Senior Society was also evidently the name given by the Sphinx when a photo of its building was published in 1907.)

An article in The Dartmouth notes that an emblem for each house has been commissioned from the same professional designer. These designs look like seals, especially with the wording around the border (and perhaps in the future the phrase “West House,” whose repetition makes the design look like a coin, can be replaced with the house motto). Most importantly, the designs — so far, anyway — are authentically connected to the houses they represent.

More on the threats to College Park and Shattuck Observatory

Posted on 30.09.2017 by Regisseur

One hopes that the conceptual design for a housing complex in College Park does not live up to the darkest predictions. And yet one must assume that the plan will not be released until it has been blessed by the Trustees.

The key justification seems to be that College Park is the only site left on campus that can fit 750 beds. Well, the Green is the only site left on campus that can fit 1,000 beds — what difference does that make? The idea that all of the needed beds must go into a single complex — far larger than any complex ever built at the college — seems entirely arbitrary, a wholly-self imposed restriction.

Dartmouth News reported on September 17:

Board members also received updates on a number of construction projects that are in the planning stages or under consideration, including the demolition of Gilman Hall, early designs for the Arthur L. Irving Institute building, the renovation of Murdough Hall, and the potential construction of new residence halls.
The College Park construction update for September 25 states:

An engineering firm will begin the College Park land survey on September 25. This work will continue through late-October.

Noise monitoring devices will be set up on October 2 in and around College Park, including 3 locations along North Park Street. The equipment will be removed in mid-October.

Is the noise monitoring meant to establish a baseline level for comparison to later construction noise, especially the noise of blasting?
The Dartmouth News story on the concept plan states that “Land surveying and site analysis of the west end of the park will be done over the next six weeks by Sasaki Architects[.]” During the second half of the nineteenth century, classes in surveying were a part of the undergraduate engineering curriculum, and a survey of College Park was a typical and probably mandatory subject of a class project each year. Student surveying teams would pose for group photos in the Bema. This is probably the most-mapped plot of land in Hanover. (And recently, students in Art History 34 plotted out a half-scale footprint of a gothic church in the Bema.)
Marlene Heck has a letter opposing the project in the Valley News.
The Dartmouth has an article and an editorial about the project.
Here’s what the Town’s 2003 master plan said about College Park:

Having shown great leadership in conserving the Mink Brook Nature Preserve, Dartmouth College should continue, where possible with the Town and others, to play a constructive role in the stewardship of special open areas. The College should preserve its special places such as the Green, the Bema, College Park, and Occom Pond.
For some reason Wikipedia has been attributing the design of Shattuck Observatory to nineteenth-century Boston architect Gridley J.F. Bryant, at least in the article about Bryant. That article also credited Bryant with the design of Dartmouth Hall, a misattribution that crept into the main Wikipedia article about Dartmouth as well as an article in the Keene Sentinel.

Reading between the lines on Shattuck’s fate

Posted on 24.09.2017 by Regisseur

The September 19 letter from John Scherding to North Park Street neighbors¹ The letter is posted with the Valley News story. Dartmouth is treading lightly now that the Town has succeeded in stopping the Indoor Practice Facility. states that “if we decide to move forward, the Bema, Bartlett Tower, and the special character of the park would be preserved.” The same phrase appears in the FAQ. What’s missing? Shattuck Observatory.

In an interview with the Valley News, Rick Mills said “When you triage the things up there, the things that rise to the absolute top are Bema and the Bartlett Tower.” There is no mention of the historic observatory, designed by Ammi Burnham Young and built in 1854.

In the September 20 Dartmouth News story by Susan Boutwell, the Bema and Bartlett Tower are described in some detail, but Shattuck Observatory is not mentioned at all. The College Park project page has no mention of existing architectural resources — only “the distinct topography, ecology, and landscape” of the site. The map is described as showing “our residential neighbors and the natural spaces to be preserved.” Of course the map also shows Shattuck Observatory, but perhaps it is not to be preserved.

One needn’t belong to the frozen-in-amber school to sense that Shattuck really should remain where it is. What if its telescopes are removed and it is surrounded by new dormitories? Fine — make Shattuck into the Professor’s House of this new House Community. Turn it into a secret society hall; put a couple of offices in there for grad students; but do not remove it.² Green Templeton College at Oxford (Wikipedia), founded in the late 20th century, occupies a piece of land that includes an old observatory, the Radcliffe Observatory. The observatory is used as the college common room and serves as the architectural symbol of the college.

——————–

 [+]

References
↑1	The letter is posted with the Valley News story. Dartmouth is treading lightly now that the Town has succeeded in stopping the Indoor Practice Facility.
↑2	Green Templeton College at Oxford (Wikipedia), founded in the late 20th century, occupies a piece of land that includes an old observatory, the Radcliffe Observatory. The observatory is used as the college common room and serves as the architectural symbol of the college.

Building a dormitory wall in College Park

Posted on 22.09.2017 by Regisseur

The college has hired Sasaki Associates¹ If this complex is built, the college should get another firm to handle the design. Sasaki’s Modernist college residential buildings look nice enough (see Regis College and the N.C. State project page and aerial) but they do not belong on this site. to come up with a conceptual design for a massive dormitory complex to be shoehorned between the Wilder Lab and Shattuck Observatory, on the edge of College Park (College Park Conceptual Design page, Dartmouth News article, Valley News article ).

The design brief calls for a capacity of 750 beds. That is more than twice the size of the East Wheelock Cluster (now East Wheelock House), including the later McCulloch Hall:

Andres Hall		84 beds
McCulloch Hall		78 beds
Morton Hall		84 beds
Zimmerman Hall		86 beds² East Wheelock House site.
Total		336 beds

One of the goals of the conceptual design process is to “respect the ridge.” Keeping the buildings low, especially at the upper end of the site, will require the college to use all of the buildable land within the entire study area. This complex is likely to be a Byker Wall (Wikipedia, Google aerial).

(To truly respect the ridge, of course, the college would have to stack all of this dormitory space into a tower sited behind Richardson Hall. That idea was raised and dropped in the 1960s.³ As strange as a dormitory tower sounds in small-town New England, it was not too much for Bowdoin College (Google Street View).)

College Park has been encroached upon for decades and is significantly smaller now than when it was created. The park could be a necessary building site some day, but the college is certainly not there yet. (And construction costs will be higher than average here because of the limits on access, the necessity of protecting trees and historic buildings, and the fact that the whole site is made up of ledges of bedrock: there will be a lot of dynamite required.)

This site was chosen because it is the only one that can hold all of the 750 beds the college believes to be necessary. The college could stand to think more creatively — there are plenty of sites around campus where new beds could be built. There is space for hundreds of beds behind Mass Row and in front of Davis Varsity House, both sites that have been reserved for residential use for years. There is a site behind Fahey/McLane. Closer to College Park, Andres could be extended to the west. Ripley and Smith could be extended to the west and east. Richardson Hall could stand to have a rear ell added, incorporating an arched gateway to the park.

While a small building or addition at the bottom end of the College Park site would be a fine idea, a double-East Wheelock Cluster simply is not appropriate here. One would love to see the campus-wide master planning⁴ Recently, Beyer Blinder Belle completed a master plan for the campus and were brought back to create a framework plan for the west end of Tuck Mall. Sasaki Associates were hired to plan out the House Communities system and were brought back to design two temporary social buildings as part of that system. Some unreleased plan presumably shows College Park as the last big unused site on campus. Could it be that the planners are now rejecting the Mass Row and Davis Varsity sites because those sites are already reserved for the various permanent, on-campus professors’ dwellings and social halls that the House Communities will need to be fully realized? That plan would be an interesting one to see. that led to the conclusion that a great wall of buildings on a cramped site of such sensitivity and meaning was the best move to make.

———————

 [+]

References
↑1	If this complex is built, the college should get another firm to handle the design. Sasaki’s Modernist college residential buildings look nice enough (see Regis College and the N.C. State project page and aerial) but they do not belong on this site.
↑2	East Wheelock House site.
↑3	As strange as a dormitory tower sounds in small-town New England, it was not too much for Bowdoin College (Google Street View).
↑4	Recently, Beyer Blinder Belle completed a master plan for the campus and were brought back to create a framework plan for the west end of Tuck Mall. Sasaki Associates were hired to plan out the House Communities system and were brought back to design two temporary social buildings as part of that system. Some unreleased plan presumably shows College Park as the last big unused site on campus. Could it be that the planners are now rejecting the Mass Row and Davis Varsity sites because those sites are already reserved for the various permanent, on-campus professors’ dwellings and social halls that the House Communities will need to be fully realized? That plan would be an interesting one to see.

A village in the Park?

Posted on 05.08.2017 by Regisseur

The Moosilauke page has a section called “Building has begun.” Dartmouth News has a report with some recent photos showing the building taking shape. Trips this year will conclude at the McLane Family Lodge at the Skiway because the Ravine Lodge will not be ready.
Photos show the steel going up at the Hood Museum addition; see also the Hood’s updates on steel, progress, and the topping-out ceremony.
More than 20 years ago an architecture magazine published a small photo of Spanish architect Ricardo Bofill’s adaptation (cleverly invasive rehabilitation? creeping residential takeover?) of an old cement plant. The work has held a fascination ever since. Now Designboom has a comprehensive article. An amazing long-term project of simultaneously inhabiting a ruin and making a “ruin”; and don’t those trees on the roof remind one of J.M. Gandy’s fantasy illustrations of Soane’s Bank of England as a ruin?
A while back the absence of personality on the part of any of the new House Communities was noted. The apparently provisional names are still in use, but the communities do seem to be coming to life. West House (on the north side of Tuck Mall) has a blog with a bit of personality. For example: West House members are called Westians. The house has a Westletter and a team in the House volleyball league. West House has been using a logo that features an image of the great elm tree that stands between Fahey and Russell Sage. Incidentally, the deadline for House Community insignia design ideas was April 10. No word yet on results.
The Dartmouth says in an article that the college is thinking of developing “a kind of ‘village'” near the Bema in the College Park. One hopes that if it is built, it is sited at the north end or on the back side of the park instead of near the Bema.

The College Park has been eyed as a building site for decades, most recently as a site for a pre-recession SLI “Commons House.” There were some terrible ideas for building there in the Fifties and Sixties; and RipWoodSmith, after all, is an encroachment on the College Park, and Richardson was probably seen that way when it was built more than a century ago.
U.Va. artisit-in-residence Mark Dion has created a “cabin of curiosities” down the hill from the Architecture School. Interesting.
Heraldry news: Along with renaming Calhoun College for Grace Hopper, Yale has given Hopper College a new coat of arms (Calhoun notice, Yale Daily News). Yale also built two new residential colleges recently, Murray and Franklin. Rather than create stone Gothic buildings, the firm of Robert A.M. Stern has designed a Tudorbethan complex of brick. The two colleges have had complimentary coats of arms for a year or more (pdf). Finally, at Harvard, the sustainability website replaces the crimson of the school’s historic shield with a pea-soup green.
The Big Green Alert Blog has a seating diagram showing Fenway Park as it will be configured for the Dartmouth v. Brown football game there on November 10.
The Medal of Honor Foundation is running elaborate eight-page print ads, such as those in Fortune Magazine, that attribute this quotation to Abraham Lincoln: “Any nation that does not honor its heroes will not long endure.”

Really? That sure does not sound like something Lincoln would say. Of course he used the phrase “can long endure” with reference to a nation in the Gettysburg Address, but that is all the more reason to doubt that this quote, similar and yet different, is also from him. And does it even make sense? Isn’t the maintenance of the military, or the food supply, or the economic might of the nation a bit more important to the nation’s survival than its treatment of its “heroes”? (And, objectively speaking, are they really heroes if they are not honored?)

The Grand Army of the Republic, which should know a Lincoln quote when it sees it, printed an article in 1909 (actually it was the GAR Department of Iowa in its Journal of Proceedings of the Annual Encampment) that contained this passage:

A man once said, “The nation which does not honor its heroes, itself should die. The nation which does not teach its children to honor its heroes, itself will die.”

No Lincoln. Someone asked the “Queries and Answers” column in the New York Times Review of Books in 1959 for the source of this statement: “A nation which does not honor its heroes soon has no heroes to honor.” I am unable to find a response.
Here’s an idea: If Davis Varsity House needs to be moved out of the way (see this snippet of the latest master plan), why not move it to the intersection of Lebanon and Crosby Streets, a roundabout-worthy urban room that could be called Larson Square? Davis would occupy the parking lot next to the Black VAC, a spot that is very close to the current location of Davis, avoiding a lot of big trees; and it fits perfectly with an intersection that is already home to two other major institutional buildings by Jens Larson.
Stained glass, old and new.

Signature panel, window in sixth bay, north side of nave, Chartres.

Window in south transept, Sainte-Mère-Église.

——

[Update 08.10.2017: Broken links to Hood photos removed, Lincoln quotation image added.]

A new direction for the old Heating Plant

Posted on 26.05.2017 by Regisseur

Introduction
The college announced recently that it won’t upgrade its Heating Plant from No. 6 fuel oil to natural gas but will instead skip directly to a more sustainable source of energy.¹Charlotte Albright, “President Hanlon: Big Green Will Go (More) Green,” Dartmouth News (22 April 2017); Aimee Caruso, “Dartmouth Plans to Cut Oil Reliance,” Valley News (23 April 2017). That energy source is likely to be biomass.²Rob Wolfe, “New Dartmouth Task Force Will Help School Go Green,” Valley News (31 August 2016); Peter Charalambous, “College to finalize heating and energy proposals,” The Dartmouth (3 February 2017); Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future,” Valley News (27 April 2017). Because a biomass plant will require a lot of land on which to store piles of wood chips for combustion, the site of the current Heating Plant south of Wheelock Street will not do.³Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future.”

The new plant

The college is mum on where the new heating plant will be built, but Dewey Field must be at the top of the list of possibilities. Dewey Field is a large, open site on Route 10 (Lyme Road) that is currently used as a parking lot. Most of the field is located outside the 10-minute walking radius that is supposed to define the limits of the campus proper. The field also is close to the northern end of the tunnel network that currently carries steam lines to the various buildings. Some posts on this site have speculated about the idea of putting a new heating plant in Dewey Field: here, here, and especially here.

Dewey Field aerial at Google Maps.

(Unfortunately for the college, Dewey Field is also close to the mansions of Rope Ferry Road. Would it be possible to locate a biomass plant on the other side of Lyme Road, up by the Corey Ford Rugby Clubhouse? Or would the inefficiency created by the long distance be too great?)

Wherever the school sites the new plant, it should be encouraged to hire an outside architect with vision. The northern gateway to Hanover is not the place for a brown, metal-sided box. While the plant at Hotchkiss might not be right for Hanover, it stands next to a golf course. It was designed by Centerbrook with civil engineering by Milone & MacBroom, both firms that have worked at Dartmouth.

Since a heating plant is a simple industrial building, it can be covered in anything. Here is an amazing plant in the Netherlands that is clad in Delft tiles.

The old plant

The Heating Plant.

The old Heating Plant is one of the better examples of historic preservation at the college.

The ground level of the plant was built as a one-story Romanesque building in 1898 (Lamb & Rich, Architects). The second level was added by the college’s other important architectural firm, Larson & Wells, in 1923. In more recent history, each time the college has placed a new boiler in the building, it has dismantled a front facade bay and then built it back again — three times, in three different bays.

This website cannot stop talking about the importance of preserving the old exhaust stack, a fundamental Hanover landmark — it is an axial terminus for Lebanon Street — and an historic symbol of the traditional function of this neighborhood as Hanover’s energy district. Yale’s master plan devotes one map to showing “major vertical objects,”⁴Yale Master Plan pdf, 94. and this stack is one of the three most important vertical objects in Hanover. It makes no difference that the stack, built in 1958, is not “original” to the building, whatever that means for this evolving industrial structure. The stack is simply too important. It satisfies the 50-year threshold to be considered “historic” under the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards anyway. (And it goes without saying that Harry A. Wells’s wonderfully adaptable 1916 Store House on Crosby Street, seen in Google Street View, also must be retained.)

The stack as seen from Lebanon Street.

The old plant in the future

Old power plants are reused all the time: see “Adaptive Reuse for Power Plants by Studio Gang and Adjaye Associates“⁵Aaron Wiener, “Adaptive Reuse for Power Plants by Studio Gang and Adjaye Associates,” Architect Magazine (1 December 2013). and the Bruner/Cott renovation of Amherst’s 1925 power house. The only natural move would be for the college to expand the Hood Museum into the empty plant building.

The old stack should become a victory column. Or the school could install a staircase and top the column with a Classical decorative element, such as the golden flaming urn of Wren’s 1677 Monument to the Great Fire of London (Wikipedia) or William Whitfield’s 2003 Paternoster Square column, seen in Google Street View (that one was built as a ventilation shaft, Wikipedia notes). Or imagine commissioning a statue or an abstract sculpture as a new signpost for the arts at Dartmouth — and for the college as a whole.

 [+]

References
↑1	Charlotte Albright, “President Hanlon: Big Green Will Go (More) Green,” Dartmouth News (22 April 2017); Aimee Caruso, “Dartmouth Plans to Cut Oil Reliance,” Valley News (23 April 2017).
↑2	Rob Wolfe, “New Dartmouth Task Force Will Help School Go Green,” Valley News (31 August 2016); Peter Charalambous, “College to finalize heating and energy proposals,” The Dartmouth (3 February 2017); Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future,” Valley News (27 April 2017).
↑3	Wolfe, “Fueling a College’s Future.”
↑4	Yale Master Plan pdf, 94.
↑5	Aaron Wiener, “Adaptive Reuse for Power Plants by Studio Gang and Adjaye Associates,” Architect Magazine (1 December 2013).

Moosilauke Ravine Lodge construction continues

Posted on 21.04.2017 by Regisseur

David Kotz has some nice photos of the construction of the new Ravine Lodge.
The Rauner Library Blog has a post on the great railroad artist Howard Fogg ’38.
Spotted this flag at a Richmond, Virginia, area high school:

The star recalls the WWII Army Air Force insignia or the Chrysler Pentastar of the Eighties. Or it could be a battlefield map depicting a star fort surrounded by infantry units. The variety of bar widths is unusual. Flags of the World explains that it is “an official symbol of remembrance of September 11th” and that when it is hoisted vertically, the wide bars are meant to be seen as the Twin Towers.

It turns out that the flag’s designer owns a restaurant very close to the school, and that he has also designed a monument to the flag (in the shape of the flag, hoisted vertically) for a traffic island nearby. “Given that it is the home of the Freedom Flag, Henrico County is the natural choice for the location of the Freedom Flag Monument and Virginia 9/11 Memorial.”
Dartmouth Now seems to have changed its name to Dartmouth News.
Other college buildings based on Independence Hall are found at Brooklyn College:

and Westminster Choir College in Princeton, N.J. (see the Google Earth 3D image).
Amherst has chosen as its mascot the Mammoth. The blurb explaining the Mammoth proposal notes that “The Beneski Museum of Natural History famously displays the skeleton of a Columbian mammoth, unearthed by Professor Frederick Brewster Loomis and brought to the College in 1925.” Museum specimens always provide good mascot options. Dartmouth’s museum displayed both a stuffed zebra and a set of curious elephant (i.e. mammoth) bones during the late eighteenth century.
The University of Virginia is celebrating its 200th anniversary and will feature bicentennial-logo zipper pulls on this year’s graduation gowns.
The city of Krakow has a new logo in the form of a city plan.
Last year the New York Times published interactive articles on mapping the shadows of New York and which existing Manhattan buildings could not be built today.
A Times obituary of March 13 noted the passing of the architectural historian and author of the Streetscapes column Christopher Gray. I was never able to meet him, but I was honored to have my site mentioned in his column on Lamb & Rich, and I enjoyed visiting the Office for Metropolitan History to do research in his compilations of 19th-century Times building permit notices (now they are in an online database provided by OMH, an amazing resource). The New Yorker ran an article about how Gray had left his skeleton to his school, St. Paul’s. What a character —

Dartmo.

The Buildings of Dartmouth College

Category Archives: Houses (“residential colleges”)