Titcomb Cabin, the one on Gilman Island, just below the bridge, burned to the ground on May 6. Titcomb was built in 1952 as a replacement for the Ledyard cabins up and down the river that were flooded when Wilder Dam raised the level of the river. Power company employees even helped build it.
Theta Delta Chi finished its Marc Fragge Wing and was scheduled to dedicate the addition on May 1.
Roc Caivano Architects of Bar Harbor, Maine, is designing the Beta Theta Pi stair addition (Planning Board approval July 1, 2008 (pdf)).
Dartmouth is adding significantly to Parkside (17 East Wheelock) to make it into a sorority house. Construction photos are now available, along with drawings by Haynes & Garthwaite.
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[Update 06.03.2013: Broken link to Caivano Architects removed.]
[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to TDX article on completion of addition removed.]
[Update 12.02.2012: Broken link to Planning Board minutes removed.]
The plans for the Parkside renovation and addition have been released. It looks like the rear wall is being bumped out under a new gable (see rear facade) and a row of dormers is being added to the front and sides. The chimneys will be lost, which is unfortunate. Here is the building a few years ago:
A couple of articles (one in pdf) explain how Barnard College used one of the Getty Foundation’s grants to create a plan for the preservation of Charles Rich’s historic campus. It turns out that Getty has shut down its campus heritage grant program, as the Chronicle‘s campus blog laments; there was even a story in the Wall Street Journal on the program shutting down after funding plans at 86 institutions.
The physical campus section of President Wright’s ten-year report mentions all the work done at Dartmouth over the last decade.
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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to Barnard articles removed.]
Rollins Chapel’s ca. 2004 renovation, the one that uncovered the windows, was designed by Theriault/Landmann Associates of Maine.
Architect Orliff Van Heik Chase of Shepley Rutan & Coolidge designed some work on the Delta Tau Delta house at Dartmouth according to William Collin Levere, Leading Greeks (1915). The basis for the work, perhaps an addition, appears to have been the fraternity’s 1874 house at 36 North Main (burned 1936). A 1915 view of the house hints at a “goat room” addition between the house and the barn. Another view appears in Barrett’s Hanover, N.H.. Chase was a 1908 Wesleyan graduate who designed houses for the fraternity at Wesleyan and Tufts as well.
A press release notes that Dartmouth received 700 acres of forested land in Corinth, Vermont, in the 1920s. The property, about 35 miles away, has been the source of timber used in College construction projects, including the McLane Family Lodge at the Skiway. The College recently conveyed to the Upper Valley Land Trust the right to develop the property extensively; some logging will continue.
Dartmouth is going ahead with Haynes & Garthwaite‘s extensive renovation of Howard Major‘s Parkside Apartment for a sorority, but not the historic James Brown House, The Dartmouth reports (an earlier report said otherwise).
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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to H&G site replaced.]
Although the Provost’s November 13 letter stated that the Visual Arts Center project would be delayed up to six weeks for a reassessment, the Valley News reported that the school is going ahead with this one before the Planning Board.
The Center will open in March 2012 (VAC project page, projects schedule [pdf]).
The commercial building that Dartmouth’s real estate office is erecting south of Lebanon Street at 4 Currier Street is well under way, as the regular photos taken from behind C&A Pizza show. Â The building will start out housing the Studio Art Department while Clement is demolished and the Visual Arts Center is built. Â Demolition of Clement, along with Brewster Hall and the oil bunker that serves the Heating Plant, will begin in May of 2009.
[Update 12.17.2008: The Big Green Alert Blog recently quoted the VN article’s quotation of John Scherding of OPDC “as saying the college ‘intend(s) to keep moving forward,’ on the project.”]
The Alumni Relations Office has devoted a small stand-alone website to Dartmouth’s trees.
A College newsletter says “The Hanover Inn is in the early planning stages of building renovations to include the guest rooms, 1st floor conference rooms, and main floor kitchen, dining and lobby areas” and names Truex Cullins & Partners as the architects. The Inn is considering expanding its footprint (Dartmouth College Finance and Administration News 1:1 (January 16, 2007), 3, [pdf] (viewed November 19, 2008)). The Inn’s website also notes that “[w]e are planning a full renovation of The Hanover Inn within the next few years and we intend to pursue our commitment to make this a model hotel for environmental concerns” (Hanover Inn, “Environmental Commitment” (updated October 21, 2008, viewed November 18, 2008)).
This project is among those whose planning was put on hold recently.
Theta Delta Chi is naming its addition to the north for Marc Fragge ’87. Several photos of the construction are available, including one showing the site in relation to Thayer Dining Hall’s west end. A November rendering of the addition shows the flanking walls lowered to reveal more clapboarding.
David Williams ’79 of Davis Brody Bond Aedas is the architect of the Tri-Kap renovation, The Dartmouth notes.
Zeta Psi has its own construction photos on line. This house is seeing some of the most extensive interior alteration of any Fuller Audit project.
The Dartmouth recently depicted Chi Gamma Epsilon with a roofed steel fire stair at its east end that looks like an incomplete Fuller Audit addition, but it is hard to tell.
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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken links to TDX news on naming and photos removed; broken links to Zeta Psi info replaced.]
[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to Davis Brody repaired.]
[Update 01.05.2013: Three broken links to The Dartmouth repaired.]
Although Dartmouth’s proposed acquisition of the high school would have deprived the town of an important element, it would have given the College a large tract of land very close to the campus. Part of the property was already in the form of sports fields, and the high school itself always seemed like it could make a good rugby clubhouse. The swap did not go through.
An unreleased proposal from a few years ago shows that someone was at least thinking of using the property for a new baseball field (putting something like Biondi Park there would have allowed Centerbrook to expand Alumni Gym) and, more interestingly, for faculty or graduate student housing. The ranks of buildings were to stand next to St. Denis Church.
The plan appears in a 2007 presentation (pdf) by architect David Bagnoli of the Washington, D.C. firm of Cunningham | Quill and might have been created by that firm.
What is most remarkable about this plan is that it nearly replicates a housing development that once stood on the same site, the wartime Sachem Village (it was the precursor to the present Sachem Village). A nice aerial of this original Sachem Village appears on page 90 of Frank Barrett’s latest book, Early Dartmouth College and Downtown Hanover.
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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken links to images fixed.]
The post-Fuller Audit addition to Jens Larson’s Tri-Kap house is depicted in drawings now available in pdf. Smith & Vansant Architects designed the set of large, traditionally-detailed brick additions: a three-bay addition to the west, a one-bay addition to the east, replacing the original porch, and a covered porch on the front or south facade. Renderings of the expanded basement indicate that it can fit four pong tables.
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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to pdf removed.]
A well-illustrated article on Hanover’s postwar Modernists, Edgar and Margaret Hunter, considers their work in the context of other North Carolina architects.
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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to Hunters article replaced.]
Over the last decade, Dartmouth’s planners have concluded that the College must expand northward onto the Golf Course relatively soon. See, for example, the 2001 Master Plan, page 11 (pdf).
The latest 2001 plan tentatively suggests a location for the new road that would be required to make this expansion possible. The road would run from the Medical School/Dewey Field, cut through Dewey Hill, and head to the northwest to provide building sites on the very edge of — or actually on top of — the 17th hole of the Golf Course.
The buildings on this road would lie beyond the 10-minute walking radius that Dartmouth takes for granted as defining its pedestrian campus. The road, which would traverse fairly steep slopes, seems likely to go nowhere and to lack a connection to either Rope Ferry or Lyme Road. Because this development would focus on a paved thoroughfare instead of an architectural space, as all of Dartmouth’s most successful expansions do, it seems likely to be suburban in character — more Centerra than Tuck Mall.
Such an expansion would only seem inevitable if one were to begin with the premise that the existing campus is “full.” That premise cannot be accurate. Dartmouth should do everything possible to prevent it from becoming accurate. There are still plenty of places to add to existing buildings or erect new ones near the center of campus. Many of these sites contained buildings in the past or have been the subjects of building proposals dating to the 1920s:
Dartmouth should replicate existing densities before it expands in ways that are suburban, needlessly university-like, or simply cause the College to spread too far from the Green.
[Update 02.06.2010: Although campuslike development beyond the walking radius should be avoided, townlike development is desirable.]
The Office of Residential Life plans to renovate the ca. 1812 James C. Brown House at 26 East Wheelock as a sorority, The Dartmouth reports. A second building slated to become a sorority house is the Parkside Apartments, a Jens Larson faculty housing block at 17 East Wheelock Street. The firm doing the work is Haynes & Garthwaite.
Meanwhile, the status page for the 4 Currier Street project notes that the three frame buildings on the site have been demolished: 4 Currier Place, 6 Sargent Place, and an outbuilding at 18 South Street.
[Update 09.07.2008: Haynes & Garthwaite information added and Parkside Apartments substituted for Ledyard Apartments, named incorrectly in original post.]
[Update 05.07.2009: Leftover reference to Jens Larson, correct when the post referred to Ledyard Apartments, removed.]
