Hitchcock Hall undergoing major renovation

Atkin Olshin Lawson-Bell is designing an extensive renovation of Hitchcock Hall, announced on the OPDC project page. The work will involve the demolition of all interior partitions (not the fireplaces), Charles Rich’s original shed-roofed (?) “resort room” in the crook of the ell, and the room’s early-1980s one-level flat-roofed expansion by Charles Hilgenhurst & Associates.

In the crook, on the original resort room footprint, will go a full-height enclosed fire stair in the same white-sided vocabulary as the interstitial elements of the firm’s Fahey and McLane Halls, across the Mall. The building will also gain a west entrance with a portico.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to article fixed.]
[Update 01.24.2007: link to fireplace note, other details added.]

Various building topics

The Dartmouth and Vox have covered a number of building-related topics recently:

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Records Management fixed.]

Phi Delt attribution, finally

The architect of the Phi Delta Theta (now Phi Delta Alpha) house on Webster Avenue has been elusive. Although Alexander Anderson McKenzie “built into this house his own integrity,” as a plaque inside states, he did not design the building.

The American Architect and Building News stated in its “Building Intelligence” section for November 10, 1900:

The Dartmouth College Chapter of Phi Delta Theta fraternity will erect a chapter-house on Webster Ave., after plans by Charles A. Rich, 24 Nassau St., N.Y. City. The structure will be built in the Colonial style prevailing in the college buildings, the lines in general being similar to those of the Gov. Hancock House, Boston.

The Phi

More preservation in the computer age

Google’s recent acquisition of the garage where it began as a company in 1998 and the preservation of the garage where Hewlett and Packard began working in 1938 point out the importance of documenting Bradley and Gerry Halls and marking their sites after they are demolished, since they have some role in the history of computing. Demolition begins as soon as this month.

Bradley is not, however, the place where Kemeny and Kurtz and others created BASIC in 1964, as reported here in “A Plea for the Shower Towers.” A College news release states that BASIC was invented in College Hall, and that is indeed where the school put its GE-235 during February of 1964 after taking delivery of it. BASIC first ran that May and the school moved the machines to the existing Bradley Hall later.

Dartmouth’s architecture in the news

Many thanks to the Review for mentioning this site in an interview. A few points will always get jumbled over the phone, and this might be a good opportunity to clarify them for the record:

  • “National Historic Registry” should read “National Register of Historic Places” and “the register.”
  • “There are state and federal tax breaks” should read “There are state and federal tax breaks for renovations. . . . In addition, anything that gets on the list has to have the owner’s permission to get listed.”
  • “There are state and federal tax breaks . . . largest in terms of commercial properties but still significant for even a home owner. But the real reason for a college to apply is that it is a blue ribbon” should read “Now, if you’re a college or university that’s not a homeowner and not a business, the real reason to be on the list is because it’s a seal of approval. It’s a blue ribbon. . . . Those tax breaks only come when you renovate your building, generally.”
  • “Clement will be supplanted by a new visual arts building designed by McCado and Silveti — a very academic, theoretical type firm — to go on that site” should read “The firm of Machado and Silvetti — big names, a very theoretical, academic-oriented firm — are designing a new visual arts building to go on that site.”
  • “Loews — that notoriously hard to find movie theatre — will, I think be moved next to the site on Lebanon Street” should read “Loew’s Auditorium will move from the Hood into this new building, and I have a feeling it will be placed on the street, on Lebanon Street, so that it will become more of a public movie theater.”
  • “If you go to Oxford you will typically see a dining hall in the vicinity of the chapel” should read “If you go to Oxford, you will typically see a dining hall in the same ‘range’ ([i.e.] the same building) as the chapel.”
  • “I don’t think it should necessarily be torn down or replaced, but it should be amended” should read “I don’t think it’s a terrible building, and I don’t think it should be torn down: I think it should be improved. . . . That said, I think Dartmouth is pretty fortunate to have Murdough and the Choates as their potentially worst buildings.”
  • “I suppose the Fairchild center gets a lot of censure, and it is incongruous. But it is cool. And it was meant to be presentable. I don’t think it’s completely convincing. But at least it is presentable” should read “It is incongruous, but at the same time, when you look at it, you can tell . . . there was a sense of style there — there was a lot of skill put into it. It’s very cool and modern — cool in the sense of being refined, you know, the steel and glass, the thin skin. . .”
  • “You could make a good argument for making use of the Crosby house (which is the name of the older part), and getting rid of the rest; it makes good use of that space” should read “[Y]ou’ve got all that land south of the building, between Blunt and Parkhurst, basically a vacant lot. . . . . You could make a good argument for a building there that would use the old Crosby House (which is the old part of Blunt), get rid of the rest, and make much better use of that space.”
  • “Essentially it was built as a hotel, as part of the town” should read “[T]he Lodge . . . was built . . . effectively as part of the town, as a motel, and then used for a school purpose.”
  • “Wheelock set it out back in the 1730s” should read “It’s one of those things that Wheelock set out back in the early 1770s.”
  • “The only unfortunate thing is that it blocks access to the grad school . . . I think this is what lead Larsen to propose a large causeway to connect Thayer dining hall area with the graduate part of the campus” should read “The only unfortunate thing about it is that it kind of blocks easy access to the graduate schools. I think there was a plan by Larson in the 1920s that proposed a very long, high causeway or bridge that would have gone from Thayer Dining Hall, basically, across to the Engineering School.”
  • “Yes, I hope some of that area is preserved, in particular the buildings . . . should be preserved” should read “although I hope, certainly, that they preserve at least one of those if they do use their sites.”
  • “South Fairbanks being the first building designed and built by Charles Rich 1875” should read “He designed it in 1892 . . . [but] Beta , . . . did not build it until around 1903 [after the school had built several buildings designed by Rich].”

Hanover in Second Life

This month’s Wired calls out the digital model of Hanover’s Main Street as one of twenty sights to see in the online community Second Life.

A researcher at the Homeland Security-funded Institute for Security Technology Studies started the project as part of the Institute’s Synthetic Environments for Emergency Response Simulation (run by its ER3 Center).

The researcher later joined The Electric Sheep Company, which the Institute hired to build the model.

Satchmo Prototype has posted photos of the model, and Electric Sheep has 64 more photos.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link below fixed.]
[Update 11.30.2006: The Dartmouth has an article on Hanover in Second Life.]
[Update 09.24.2006: Post rewritten, Electric Sheep information added.]

Pong on film

Is the film Beerfest (2006) the first film to depict the playing of pong? (See The Dartmouth;Wikipedia.) The characters appear to use paddles, but the film’s creators learned the game at Colgate.

Daniel Lindsay, director of a post-9/11 documentary titled Why U.S.?, is directing a film meant to document pong and its history on a national scale, according to an article in The Dartmouth. He and producer Josh Otten were in Hanover gathering material in November.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Stanford Daily regarding Why U.S.? removed, broken link to The Dartmouth fixed.]
[Update 12.12.2006: Documentary information added.]

The Lodge will be demolished

Dartmouth acquired the Sargent Block, which contains the Hanover Inn Motor Lodge (Brooke Fleck, 1960), and it plans to redevelop the entire block. As with the South Block, this means demolishing most of the buildings.

Although the Lodge has been used for the last twenty years or so as a dormitory, it will be closed during the 2006-2007 year. The very attractive new campus map featuring dormitories also omits the Lodge.

These seem to be the first public signs that the Lodge is about to go. It will be interesting to see what the school builds in its place and how closely it follows the Town’s bold vision for the block.

[Update 08.03.2006: text corrected]
[Update 08.09.2006: “Sargent” added]

The historic Hanover Country Club House

Hanover Country Club House, Dartmouth College

The Hanover Country Club would seem to be Dartmouth’s oldest athletic building, a nineteenth-century barn remodeled as an Arts & Crafts clubhouse by Homer Eaton Keyes in 1916. It is still in excellent shape and well used, although there has been talk for several years of replacing it, presumably with a clubhouse some distance from campus on Lyme Road.

(The school’s oldest intercollegiate athletic facility must be the Alumni Oval of 1893, which was remodeled as Memorial Field and is being remodeled again this summer — meaning that the site and the form have been replicated through the years but that none of the original materials survive.)

[Update 09.12.2006: clubhouse remodeling date corrected.]