Planning for “House Communities”

Posted on 03.03.2015 by Regisseur

House professors will begin living in college-owned residences near their house communities in the summer of 2016. Staff members are working on details related to the makeup of the house communities and location of faculty housing.

(“Work Is Under Way on Moving Dartmouth Forward Plan” Dartmouth Now (26 February 2014).)

Frost House (“The White House”) in the East Wheelock Cluster is an obvious choice, but what about the other House Communities? South Fairbanks would work for Mass Row; Blunt for the Gold Coast; Hallgarten for Topliff; and the recent faculty residence for Cutter/Shabazz, but the others might be tough. The Hitchcock/Fayers Cluster will be especially tough, unless SAE or Bartlett is commandeered.

Building Dartmouth Forward

Posted on 02.02.2015 by Regisseur

President Hanlon’s plan, according to the college, includes these elements:

By the fall of 2016, every student who enters Dartmouth will be placed in one of six house communities. Each community will have a cluster of residence halls as a home base, be responsible for organizing and hosting social and academic programs, and eventually, have a dedicated space for study and social interaction. Beginning sophomore year, students will reside within their residence hall cluster when living in the dorms, but even those students living in a first-year dorm, Greek house, affinity house or off-campus will be included in all community activities and events.

Each Residence Community will have a house professor and graduate students in residence.

The article in The D has extensive observation from Robert O’Hara of The Collegiate Way.

The six “houses” presumably will be these, found at the current “residential communities” page:

East Wheelock
The Fayerweathers, Ripley/Woodward/Smith, Wheeler & Richardson
Massachusetts Row, the Gold Coast and Hitchcock
McLaughlin Cluster
The Russell Sage Cluster
Topliff/New Hampshire and The Lodge

The preferred nomenclature seems to have shifted in recent months from “neighborhoods” to “houses” or “house communities.” The 1980s-1990s word “cluster” now refers to groups of faculty hires.

Neighborhood planning, other topics

Posted on 19.11.2014 by Regisseur

In 4 Currier, the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network Innovation Center and New Venture Incubator is operating (NHBR, via Dartmouth Now).
The extensive renovation has ended and Triangle House is now open (Dartmouth Now).
Amidon Jewelers is closing its store on Main Street, The Dartmouth notes. Amidon has been in town since 1935.
The College is looking at using natural gas or another fuel in the Heat Plant in place of No. 6 heating oil (The Dartmouth). It’s not clear that this move will lead to a new heating plant on Dewey Field, but there is always the possibility.
From Dartmouth Now, “neighborhoods” get a timeline:

The Board also discussed the ongoing planning and development of possible residential housing models that could be implemented beginning with the Class of 2019.
Dunc’s Mill, a Vermont rum distillery, displays on its building a rare matched set of Vermont windows (see the post here).
The Tucker Foundation is seeking comments on its split into religious and service groups (Dartmouth Now).
The Planner’s Blog has a post on induced demand for roads.
The Dartmouth has a general article on campus construction that says:

Gilman Hall, the now-closed former home of the biology department and proposed location for the academic center, will remain vacant for the foreseeable future, Hogarty said. Though the College investigated potential uses for the building over the summer, it did not decide on an immediate course of action. While housing was considered as one option, this would have been too expensive.

With Gilman on the road to weedy dereliction, somebody with FO&M needs to rescue those original lettered transom panels.
The Pine Park Association has a video of the construction of the new pedestrian bridge over Girl Brook.
Bruce at the Big Green Alert blog justifies his proposed name for the soon-to-be annual season-ending football game against Brown: The Tussle in the Woods.
There is some discussion of the Ravine Lodge demolition proposal at Views from the Top.
Waterfront New York: Images of the 1920s and ’30s is a new book of watercolor paintings by Aldren A. Watson, the Etna illustrator and writer who died in 2013 (Valley News, aldrenwatson.com). Watson might be familiar to readers from the trio of aerial sketches he did for The College on the Hill: A Dartmouth Chronicle (1965), precisely-delineated snapshots of Dartmouth in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1960s. The last of these is etched at a large scale on a glass partition in Six South.
There is a new football website (via Big Green Alert blog). In the Athletics > Ivy League section, the green “D” logo has mercifully shed its TM mark.

Go Go Panarchy; other news

Posted on 23.10.2014 by Regisseur

College Supplies, on Main Street, is closing (The Dartmouth, Valley News).
Panarchy is finally tackling fire-safety upgrades to its Greek Revival house (Valley News, The Dartmouth). The group has set up an Indiegogo campaign to raise money.
Construction inside 4 Currier has ended and the Innovation Center has opened (The Dartmouth, Dartmouth Now). Construction is also ending at Kappa Delta’s new house on Occom Ridge and at the Triangle House renovation project.
Valley Road in Hanover now has “suggestion lanes” for bicycle and foot traffic (The Dartmouth). Other noteworthy articles in The D cover the addition to the Food Co-Op and the Wilder Dam relicensing process.
At the September Trustees’ meeting, according to The Dartmouth,

Interim Dean of the College Inge-Lise Ameer and campus planning vice president Lisa Hogarty gave a presentation on residential life concepts, including the neighborhood system, which would assign students to a residential cluster from the beginning of their time at Dartmouth similar to a house system.

This new residential system is in “active planning,” Hanlon said. “It’s bold, it’s transformational and it’s also very complex.”
“The Board also approved the second-phase schematic design of the Hood Museum of Art project” (Dartmouth Now).
The rivening of the Tucker Foundation continues (The Dartmouth).
Watch some super aerial footage of the Dartmouth Night Bonfire (via Big Green Alert).
The Rauner Library Blog has a post on the Grid-Graph, the illuminated glass display board on which students reenacted away games for football fans in the west gym of Alumni Gym.
The Times has an interesting article on branding/visual identity/signage at Barnard College. The third photo shows a pair of carved limestone (?) cartouches on the front facade of the school’s main building. Designed by Charles Rich, the building somewhat foreshadowed the smaller Wilder Laboratory at Dartmouth, which substitutes oval windows for the cartouches.
The West Wheelock Charrette Report was presented to the Planning Board (minutes pdf). There were several comments about “cleaning up” the area.
Campus Planning & Facilities seems to have shifted its news output from its website to a newsletter called Behind the Green. From issue 1:3 (July 2014) (pdf) we learn that the old roof shingles of Webster Cottage have been replaced with shingles of Alaskan Yellow Cedar (a.k.a. Nootka Cypress), and that design is under way for landscape work carrying out elements of the Van Valkenburgh plan near Collis, Robinson, and the Gold Coast.

Lebanon’s pedestrian mall, other topics

Posted on 28.06.2014 by Regisseur

The minutes of the Alumni Council 208th session note that “A top priority ahead is an indoor practice facility, which is under consideration for pre-campaign fundraising.”
The school’s new “Living[-]Learning Communities” site is up and has pages for Triangle House, etc. A link to Sasaki’s MyCampus survey is placed in a box labeled “Help Make Res Life Cool Again at Dartmouth” [ugh].
More on the new Thayer School buildings: Dean Joseph J. Helble, interviewed by Karen Endicott in “Growth Factors,” Dartmouth Engineer Magazine:

Clearly if we grow the faculty substantially — certainly if we double the faculty — we’re going to need a new facility…. We’re in the early stages of conceptualizing what a facility might be, and where near Cummings and MacLean it could be located. We had a first conversation at a faculty retreat in December. The next step is to engage an architectural and engineering firm to begin working with us to explore options and ultimately provide some conceptual design options for us to consider.
Yestermorrow Design-Build School in Warren, Vermont offers a Semester in Sustainable Building and Design, a proper exchange program, and Dartmouth students have taken part (photo).
A tidbit from the biography of the late David McLaughlin, Dartmouth President from 1981 to 1987. On the D-Plan:

Now, all these years later, I continue to think even more strongly that the adoption of the Dartmouth Plan was one of the most unfortunate decisions the college ever made — necessary at the time, but unfortunate.

While the Dartmouth Plan was a matter of expediency, the fact that twenty-some years later it is still in effect represents, I believe, a failure in governance and leadership.¹David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed, 2007), 80.
The Archives’ amazing on-line collection continues to yield fascinating photos, such as these aerials of the Tuck School under construction; Lebanon Street, showing the then-new McNutt addition to the Inn and the complete Rogers’ Garage (part of which later became Clement Hall, the painting and sculpture studios); the rear of Mass Row and South Fairbanks, giving a rare look at the original exterior of the Beta Goat Room; and the MHMH in an early form, showing Dewey Farm buildings.
The decrepit old College Cleaners building on Allen Street (July 2013 Street View, July 2009 Street View showing equal decrepitude) was put up for sale last fall in a foreclosure auction.
Take a look at Max Van Pelt’s 2010 architecture class project: a design for a new clubhouse for the Hanover Country Club.
Some surplus bathroom sinks from the Hanover Inn renovation are available at Vermont Salvage in WRJ.
In 2005, John Thelin, author of A History of American Higher Education, “concluded that Dartmouth’s ‘history is not dispensable nostalgia or an antiquarian slide show. It’s the key to understanding the institution’s enduring vitality'” (Valley News; Thelin nominated Dartmouth to Booz Allen Hamilton’s list of enduring institutions (pdf)).
A tidbit from the McLaughlin biography. On the self-perpetuating board:

I long ago formed a conviction that the number of trustees nominated by a board itself should be no less than seventy-five percent of the board, and that the board and the alumni should work collaboratively on selecting the balance of the nominees, being sure that the qualifications of the nominees would relate positively to the current needs of the board, with respect to specific skills and to spheres of competence. A provision that all nominees be selected through a popular vote discourages highly successful individuals who would serve the institution if invited to do so, but who would not be willing to “run for office.” Having too great a portion of the board chosen by a process that is quite likely to exclude some of the best candidates does not, in my opinion, augur well for achieving optimum effectiveness in governance.²David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed, 2007), 102.
The Valley News has stories on Lebanon’s epochal fire of 1964. One of the stories focuses on the pedestrian mall that replaced the devastated stretch of Hanover Street. Lebanon would be the first place to look for anyone proposing to pedestrianize Hanover’s Main Street below Wheelock.
A report of last year’s West Wheelock Street design charrette by Plan NH is available (pdf). Excellent ideas: dense housing on the street, a new cemetery entrance, signage indicating the Appalachian Trail route, and a statue of John Ledyard.
Just noticed that the Association of Alumni blog was pulled at some point during the last few months.

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References
↑1	David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed, 2007), 80.
↑2	David T. McLaughlin with Howard J. Coffin, Choices Made (Hanover, N.H.: Privately printed, 2007), 102.

It looks like dining halls are out

Posted on 22.06.2014 by Regisseur

The Valley News:

Hanlon reiterated his support for the creation at Dartmouth of a “house system” similar to those in existence at a majority of Ivy League colleges. That system, in which undergraduates have a stable affiliation with a residence hall where faculty are present, is aimed at “creating a greater variety of social options on campus,” he said. Dartmouth could create houses in existing residence buildings or clusters of such buildings, but without their own dining facilities, he said. The cost of the undertaking is currently being assessed by architects who recently visited the campus.¹Rick Jurgens, “Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon Shares His Vision, Discusses College’s Future,” Valley News (18 June 2014).

What’s left to distinguish the new neighborhood from the Eighties cluster? Perhaps only a faculty residence, if that.

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References
↑1	Rick Jurgens, “Dartmouth President Phil Hanlon Shares His Vision, Discusses College’s Future,” Valley News (18 June 2014).

Planning for the “neighborhood”

Posted on 21.05.2014 by Regisseur

Neighborhoods

We learn from The Dartmouth of March 21 that the Board of Trustees wants to change the housing system to focus on “neighborhoods” in order to increase continuity and so on. But there will be more to it than administrative changes, according to The Dartmouth of April 1:

[Mike Wooten] said a full transition to the “neighborhoods” system could take up to 10 years.

Wooten said he hopes outside architectural firms will submit design recommendations by fall 2014. Any construction projects, including renovations, will be decided after a firm is selected.

The college has selected Sasaki Associates as the design firm. Sasaki is currently designing an indoor practice facility to stand next to the Boss Tennis Center and has designed a master plan for Vermont Law School in South Royalton. The Dartmouth writes:

Based on their research, the Sasaki team and ORL will determine by the end of the summer whether to construct new residence halls in addition to renovating existing living spaces, Wooten said.

The MyCampus survey software that Sasaki uses in its research was created for the master planning process at Babson College in Massachusetts. The firm’s idea-gathering at Dartmouth started yesterday (Planner’s Blog).

In this early stage, the neighborhoods idea sounds a lot like the “cluster” program of the mid- and late-1980s.

Clusters and Faculty Residences

The cluster program now seems to have been mostly an organizational effort, but it did include a substantial architectural component. A series of projects, and presumably the prior study and planning, were carried out by the Boston firm of Charles G. Hilgenhurst Associates. The college made kitchen/lounge renovations in several dorms and built significant additions on others:

Lounge addition at rear of New Hampshire Hall
Lounge addition in crook of Topliff Hall
Expansion of original social room in crook of Hitchcock Hall
Hyphen connecting Butterfield and Sage Halls
Two hyphens connecting North, Middle, and South Fayerweather Halls

Lounges or social rooms, of course, are not new; they go back in a formal sense to North and South Massachusetts (1911-1912, Charles A. Rich).

The difference between an old cluster and a new neighborhood might be the inclusion of faculty residences. The institutional effort to establish a spatial association between faculty and student housing at Dartmouth goes back to the optimistic Fifties and seems to have been influenced by preparatory school practice. The Clark Preparatory School left Hanover for Cardigan Mountain in 1953 and sold its campus to Dartmouth. The college turned Clark’s Alumni Hall (1938, Jens F. Larson) into a dormitory and renamed it Cutter Hall. The building’s existing prep-school room layout included a faculty residence; Dartmouth seems not only to have left the floor plan unchanged but to have created a living-learning residential program to fit it.

The college also began to make plans for a whole group of dormitories on the prep school’s athletic field, behind Alumni Hall. This group of Choate Road Dormitories (1956, Campbell & Aldrich) would comprise two pairs of dormitories, each with a faculty residence attached. The bold, idealistic, cinderblocky experiment of the Choates did not last long. Faculty residences were left out of the River Cluster, built by the same firm just a few years after the Choates. The Cutter Hall program also dropped the faculty element within a few years.

The only new dorms the college would erect as part of the 1980s cluster movement, the East Wheelock Cluster (1985-1987, Herbert S. Newman Associates), did not involve a faculty residence at first. They were planned, by a New Haven architect used to designing Yale colleges, to include four buildings. The program was pared to three buildings and Frost House (the White House) was spared. The house became the faculty residence for the “supercluster” iteration of East Wheelock when it was constituted in 1996 (see Dartmouth Now on the current changeover to a new faculty director).

Residential Colleges

Since the Harkness gifts of the late 1920s allowed Harvard and Yale to follow the form if not the underlying federative structure of Oxford or Cambridge,¹See Alex Duke, Importing Oxbridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities (New Haven: Yale, 1997). a lot of study has gone into the idea that a large institution should be split into smaller living-learning units (see the Collegiate Way website).

Although traditional anti-universitization sentiment requires that the Harvard/Yale idea be distinguished at Dartmouth (see the pains taken by Dartmouth Now to mention unique local circumstances), Dartmouth’s administration finally seems ready to commit fully to a residential college program. During the 1920s, Dartmouth’s President Hopkins

considered the possibility of breaking up the entire College into similar units. He finally decided that Dartmouth was uniquely suited to be one big unit, and that all that was lacking was a central student union which would have social and educational advantages.²Charles E. Widmayer, Hopkins of Dartmouth (Hanover: UPNE, 1977), 123.

The eventual Hopkins Center for the Arts included a snack bar and a student maibox area, but it obviously is not a glue that can hold the big unit together. Over the next few years, it will be interesting to see what architectural solutions are invented to tackle this social problem now that the administration has determined that the monolith cannot be maintained.

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References
↑1	See Alex Duke, Importing Oxbridge: English Residential Colleges and American Universities (New Haven: Yale, 1997).
↑2	Charles E. Widmayer, Hopkins of Dartmouth (Hanover: UPNE, 1977), 123.

A non-proposal for dividing Dartmouth into a federation of “residential colleges”

Posted on 22.12.2010 by Regisseur

Following are some thoughts, inspired in part by the excellent Collegiate Way site, about dividing Dartmouth into a federation of independent “residential colleges.”

This is not a sincere proposal: I do not think that Dartmouth should be divided into residential colleges, and I have no evidence that Dartmouth is considering anything related to residential colleges. The closest Dartmouth has come to something like this in recent years was its creation of the cluster program of the mid-1980s and the construction of the East Wheelock Cluster. That cluster is not a true residential college, and it was not thought of as the start of any kind of campuswide program.

This proposal is meant instead (1) as an exercise that might promote the more efficient development of the campus through small additions, and the improvement of outdoor spaces; and (2) as a suggestion of how, if residential colleges ever were to be created, they should be designed. If Dartmouth actually were to create a residential college system, I suspect that budget constraints and alumni opposition would severely limit the effort. This proposal is meant to show what a wholehearted program would be.

Each of the nine “residential colleges” (here called “consortia” to avoid confusion) is given an average of 400 beds, a faculty resident’s house, and a dining hall.

A variation on one of the consortia in greater detail.

The most important and difficult part is making the buildings contiguous or at least related and giving them legible spaces to surround. The most resistant consortium is the Wheeler-Richardson combination. The group depends on Rollins being brought in as a dining hall and the three buildings being connected, and even then the site has no room for a faculty residence. The SAE house might work, or a new house could be built rather close to the Old Pine.

Dartmo.

The Buildings of Dartmouth College

Category Archives: Houses (“residential colleges”)