The Rockefeller Archive Center has a record of an early (1949-50) offer by Nelson Rockefeller to commission plans for a new dormitory at Dartmouth by Wallace Harrison. The offer was not taken up. This was before any Modernist building had appeared on campus, and if they had a site in mind, it might have been the Choates.
The tenth Earl of Dartmouth visited campus in April (The Dartmouth, press release). The press release has a short video.
Jeff Stikeman describes in detail how he created the presentation views for the Visual Arts Center.
The Center remained under review at the Board’s April meeting, but the Concord Monitor (and Valley News) report that the Town has been asked for a building permit. The formal review of the financing will occur in June.
In August of 2010, Dartmouth and UPNE will publish a coffee-table book edited by Richard Pult depicting the posters of Winter Carnival over the years, The Dartmouth reports. Commemorating the Outing Club’s Centennial, the book will depict all of the posters since Hovey Muralist Walter Beach Humphrey ’14 designed the first one in 1911. The design competition began in 1936.
—–
[Update 12.02.2012: Broken link to news article fixed.]
As mentioned in the Dartmouth Parents & Grandparents Fund newsletter (Winter 2009), the book project underway at the moment is a monograph on Lamb & Rich. This is the same project mentioned back in 2004 and will take a few more years to complete.
—–
[Update 05.11.2013: Broken link to parents newsletter removed.]
About 85 views have been added to Views of Dartmouth. The most interesting ones are the interior views of the Heating Plant (found in Views > East Side) and old photos of the west and south sides of the Green (in Views > West Side and > General Views).
The DOC Centennial gets a school press release and Vox mention as the subject of this year’s Carnival.
The MIrror is about Blitzmail this week.
Heraldry and the history of pong collide in a shirt available from On the Hill.
—–
[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to On the Hill removed.]
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.
—–
[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to Barnard articles removed.]
Engineer Richard D. Kimball and his firm helped design Dartmouth’s Heating Plant and original network of steam pipes in the mid-1890s. It turns out that RDK Engineers is still around and claims that its project at Dartmouth was the first underground steam distribution system in the country.
The 2001 Arts Center Infrastructure Analysis (pdf) by Rogers Marvel with Ove Arup suggests that the heat plant eventually move to Dewey Field, north of the Medical School. That would allow the Hood Museum or other arts functions to take over the old plant building.
The Council of Independent Colleges maintains detailed building-by building information in its Historic Campus Architecture Project. Â One interesting revelation is that Charles Augustus Young, the Dartmouth graduate of 1853, well-known Princeton astronomer, and participant in the design of Dartmouth’s Shattuck Observatory with his uncle, architect Ammi Burnham Young, is listed as the designer of the 1881 Williston Observatory at Mount Holyoke College. Â The interesting shingled building does not appear to follow the plan of Shattuck.
Cornell’s marching band has been the subject of a parade in Manhattan since the mid-1970s. Â Although it has grown from one block to six blocks in length, it is still New York City’s shortest parade, Cornell reports. Â This year it followed the Cornell-Columbia football game.
Polemicist-architect Leon Krier has seen a small number of his buildings built around the world. Â The few in the U.S. include what is probably his first university building in this country, the Jorge M. Perez Architecture Center at the University of Miami (2005). The bright white, rather Byzantine building is unconventional, although it does not seem to have been given a particularly transformative site (the campus map [pdf] shows it at L-6). Â See the extensive photography by Mary Ann Sullivan and article by Andres Viglucci, “Architecture: A Building Apart,” CNU Florida (posted October 16, 2005).
U.N.H. Professor Blake Gumprecht’s book The American College Town has been published. Â The U.N.H. press release provides some information about the book, and Inside Higher Ed interviewed the author.
Moore Ruble Yudell, designers with Bruner/Cott of Dartmouth’s McLaughlin Cluster, Kemeny/Haldeman Hall, and the upcoming ’53 Commons, continue to work on major campus projects around the world, as explained in an article in Metropolis. Â Here in the U.S., the South Lawn project at the University of Virginia attempts to continue Jefferson’s Lawn beyond its termination at a set of existing buildings, carrying the space across a street and around a corner. Â In Dublin, Ireland, the firm is designing the transformation of the large parklike grounds of a former insane asylum (Grangegorman) into a campus for the Dublin Institute of Technology.
Metropolis also has an article (pdf) on the “post-American campus” in the Middle East, which is experiencing a boom in construction of American-influenced universities. Â American University of Kuwait, the school Dartmouth has chosen to create extensive partnerships with since it opened in 2004, is planning a new campus of its own. Â A preliminary proposal depicted on page 4 of the AUK Chronicle (June 2008) (pdf) suggests that the campus will be secure and auto-oriented and might share more with the early-ninth century St. Gall Monastery Plan than a typical American campus.
—–
[Update 05.11.2013: Broken link to Metropolis article repaired; broken link to “post-American campus” removed.]
[Update 01.05.2013: Broken link to Newsday article on Cornell parade replaced; broken links to Perez Architecture Center and AUK Chronicle pdf removed.]
The Hill Winds Society is producing a book on school traditions with an organization called the Sphinx Foundation. The foundation is connected with the Sphinx Senior Society but not the College, as an editorial in The Dartmouth explains. It has Professor Emeritus Jere Daniell speak on different Dartmouth history topics now and then and sponsored his recent talk on the Wheelock Succession (article in The Dartmouth). The foundation apparently sends letters to incoming students.
The Dartmouth Outing Club Centennial is approaching at the beginning of 2009 and the club now has a page up with an ambitious schedule of activities.
Erik Anjou’s and Mark Bernstein’s documentary Eight: Ivy League Football and America has been released (The Dartmouth, Big Green Alert Blog). The official page suggests that the film shares with Bernstein’s book the shaky contention that the first intercollegiate football game was played in 1869. There was a “football” game played that year, but it was “football” in the English sense, what Americans now call soccer. The first college football game (ancestor of today’s American/gridiron football) was not played until 1874, when McGill’s rugby team played Harvard.
—–
[Update 05.11.2013: Broken link to Parents News article on Hill Winds removed.]
[Update 11.12.2012: Broken link to documentary replaced.]
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.
—–
[Update 11.17.2012: Broken links to images fixed.]
Yale announced that Robert A.M. Stern, head of Yale’s architecture school and architect of Moore Hall at Dartmouth (but nothing at Yale), will design two new residential colleges that will join the dozen colleges already existing and allow enrollment to grow from about 5,200 to about 6,000. A nice map shows the relation of the site to the existing colleges; the perceived distance from the center seems to be causing controversy.
Yale has come out with a new book called Yale in New Haven that focuses on the institution’s urbanism.
A check of the latest online map for Yale shows an impressively detailed work, but using it still seems to require a great deal of calculation by the user.
—–
[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to online map replaced, this commentary removed: “Everything interesting seems to lie on the seams between the map zones. Perhaps we have all been spoiled by Google Maps’ draggability. The map instructions are a bit funny: ‘Welcome to the Yale University interactive map. Please use the map to quickly find buildings and organizations on campus.'”]
[Update 01.05.2013: Broken link to pdf map replaced.]
A well-illustrated article on Hanover’s postwar Modernists, Edgar and Margaret Hunter, considers their work in the context of other North Carolina architects.
—–
[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to Hunters article replaced.]
Randall T. Mudge & Associates, Architects have created a firm website relatively recently. Familiar projects will include the Powerhouse Shopping Center in West Lebanon, David’s House at DHMC, and Dragon and the Rugby Clubhouse at Dartmouth.
One is gratified to see that, in preparation for naming Baker’s Catalogue Room after a donor, the fundraising website has changed its description of the redeveloped space from “Scholars’ Green” to “Main Hall.”
—–
[Update 12.02.2012: Broken link to Dartmouth Experience site removed.]
The article in The Dartmouth has a depiction of the Visual Arts Center from another angle:
The story in the Valley News, in which one person on a College committee of town advisors calls the building “hideous,” has been picked up by the Nashua Telegraph, the Boston Globe, Burlington’s WPTZ tv, the [Laconia?] Foster’s Daily Democrat, and others.
It is unfortunate that the materials presented to the committee are not available on line, and that readers have only the two images from which to judge the design. It is also unfortunate that some of the committee members quoted failed to give thoughtful reasons to object to the design. Dartmouth will probably ask for more than unsubstantiated, unsophisticated gut reactions before it considers redesigning this building.
For example, calling the design too “urban” is like calling the Green too “grassy.” The site is urban, as is all of downtown Hanover. This part of Hanover is not a traditional New England village, it’s an ex-automobile dealership located between an industrial heating plant and a faux-industrial auditorium. The site is presently occupied by a parking lot, some College lawns, an industrial building, and a prettified one-time workers’ housing unit. A portion of Lebanon Street might be a part of the campus in a technical sense, but it is not in an aesthetic sense. The arts center does not belong on the site of Parkhurst, and Parkhurst does not belong here.
Critics who term the design “Southwestern” might be reacting to the way the wall colorings are depicted in the renderings. The renderings available on line do not do justice to the complex natural coloration of the building’s large panels of slate cladding. These panels are probably black lace rust slate from Norway and can be seen in photographs at Vermont Structural Slate and in the Harvard architects’ design for a branch of the Boston Public Library (Flickr search; a particularly nice photo). People will walk up to this building just to touch it.
—–
[Update 11.17.2012: Broken links to Telegraph and WPTZ removed.]
,%20Mount%20Holyoke%20College-small.jpg){kind=link}
