Category Archives: Rollins Chapel

About Rollins Chapel at Dartmouth College.

Another report from the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter, five years on

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During 2014 this site noted the progress that Oxford University was making in its redevelopment of a large former hospital site in the north end of town. At the time, the site of the Blavatnik School of Government was a hole in the ground:


The building has since been finished:


The site before:


After:


As noted, the circle-in-a-square building has a remarkable precedent at Oxford, the Radcliffe Camera (indeed, the Camera is such a symbol of the university that the Blavatnik School uses the Camera rather than its own building as the main image on its website).
The former St. Paul’s Church at left is the Freud Cafe and Bar. It appears much as it did in 1994, albeit more overgrown (see also the 2014 post on chapels as libraries).

Pictorial history for 250th; other topics

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  • The project of picking the location for a 350-bed dorm now has a project page. The architect for the site search is Sasaki.

  • On the Dana renovation, Leers Weinzapfel Associates has some slightly different images — the glass is much smokier, answering the obvious concern about solar heat gain.

  • A new college history book will be coming out as part of the 250th anniversary:

    Told through an eclectic mix of text and images, the new history will be beautifully produced, heavily illustrated and designed to capture the spirit, character, diverse voices, and accomplishments of the College, while implicitly making the case that Dartmouth’s historic contributions to society will only become greater as Dartmouth moves forward in the 21st century.

    (Book Arts Workshop bookplate competition.)

  • The guidelines (pdf) for that bookplate competition refer to an “Official Dartmouth 250 logo.” Such a logo does not seem to have been released yet. The anniversary website has a 250 logo that is made up from elements of the recent OCD visual identity and is part of a larger image described as a “Photo of Baker Library with 250 logo graphic overlay,” but that cannot be it.

  • The Valley News reports that a new apartment building is being proposed near Jesse’s.

  • Lebanon is on the way to acquiring control of the B&M Roundhouse between Main and the river in West Leb (Valley News; editorial). It is not clear what buildings on the site might be saved. Here is a Street View:

  • The Hood addition is finished and the museum will open on January 26, 2019 (Here in Hanover). The landscape design is by Hargreaves.

  • A charming story in the Valley News about the opening of a time capsule in Royalton.

  • The Planning Board minutes (pdf) refer to the moving-water rowing tanks in the new addition to the boathouse: “When flushing the tanks, the College will file a discharge permit with the Town. This is expected to occur once a year.” More information on the project is available from Dartmouth News and the Valley News.

  • The Planning Board has been discussing the Wheelock House project, focusing on the driveway and the maximum of 27 beds that might go into the house. Apparently there is a preservation easement (placed by the college when it owned the building?) that limits changes to the front facade and the interior of the first floor of the original main block of the building. There is no mention of documenting or otherwise preserving any part of the addition before it is demolished (minutes pdf).

  • There is a newish farmhouse brewery called Polyculture about a half-hour from campus (Valley News). This is a reminder that nobody seems to have run with the fact that Eleazar Wheelock harvested grain and operated a malthouse alongside the college.

  • The 1964 College on the Hill is on line (pdf).

  • The River Park development in West Leb is going ahead. The flagship building at 100 River Park is by Elkus Manfredi of Boston. Images of the building show that it partially encloses a Pratt truss bridge: that’s an actual bridge, right, and not a gimmick?

  • There has been no word in many months on the Sargent Block project, phase II of the big downtown redevelopment project south of the Hop and east of Main Street. Slate had an article on how schools are becoming real estate titans.

  • More from the Valley News: an article on reusing old skis in furniture and other objects.

  • A recent article in the Times focused on church reuse in Montreal; a minor further example is St. Jean-Baptiste, whose basement has become the headquarters of the ad firm Upperkut.

    Here’s to the Polka Dot; other topics

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    • The Valley News has an article with some superb photographs on the Polka Dot Restaurant by the tracks in White River Junction. The 1925 building seems to have hosted a diner from the beginning; owner Mary Shatney started working there in 1959 and had to close the place last year. It’s up for sale — let’s hope it remains a restaurant.

    • The Dartmouth Energy Program site is very impressive. In the history section, the excellent photo of the coal assistant seems to have been taken from the east end of the hall looking west. The narrow-gauge rails lead toward the coal hopper in the end of the building, now the site of the Hood Museum’s Bernstein Study-Storage Center. A couple of quibbles: first, “the good old days” actually began in 1770, not 1769; second, the timeline could mention the major addition of a second level to the building in 1922, apparently when the plant switched from coal to oil; and third, there’s something off about the wording of this sentence on the main page, however technically correct it might be: “While Dartmouth may be the smallest Ivy League university, we’re doing big things with energy efficiency.”

    • Excellent photo documentation of the construction of the West Stands continues at the Big Green Alert: April 24, April 23, April 22, April 19, April 18 (notable photos), April 8, April 7 (seating chart), March 23, and March 16.

    • The photo in the Valley News story on spring practice makes Memorial Field look as if it occupies an industrial wasteland. The runway at which Memorial Field’s concrete risers were stored for about six years, incidentally, was known as Miller Airport (Abandoned & Little-Known Airfields).

    • Victor Mair ’65 at Language Log takes on the word “schlump,” of “schlump season,” i.e. “mud season” (“breakup” in Alaska).

    • The Rauner Library Blog has interesting posts on the petition of Ledyard and others to be allowed to learn to dance and use the sword and a mysterious photo album called Along the Connecticut 1912.

    • The Watershed Studio website features several notable projects, including the Friends of Hanover Crew boathouse, the Organic Farm greenhouse, and a design for the replacement Ledyard Canoe Club.

    • Maybe the real test for the Residential Communities (a post here) will be the Commencement ceremony. Will the Communities be represented in the procession? The graduates will still have to march in alphabetical order, but will the House Professors carry the house emblems?

    • The West Wheelock Gateway District proposal is up for a vote and has been getting some press (Valley News, The Dartmouth). The VN story has this neat tidbit:

      Around the corner from Anderson, William Smalley owns a small white house sandwiched between rental buildings mostly filled with Dartmouth students.

      In an interview Monday at his home, where he has lived since 1938, Smalley said he welcomed the creation of the district and didn’t mind the parties the students occasionally threw.

      “Somebody said to me, ‘How can you stand them?'” he said of the students, but “I’ve never had a problem with them — never.”

    • The college’s Flickr account has a neat and unusual view of Dartmouth Row, Ascutney, Richardson, and the Wilder addition. See the photo of the graffiti inside the Bartlett Tower roof. The structure does not look particularly original (1895) but there are graffiti from 1910 and 1915, so perhaps it is.

    • The Hanover Master Plan (pdf) contains a number of interesting tidbits, including this one: “The Town’s boundary stones and monuments are also historic landmarks. Most have the first letters of the adjacent towns incised in them.”

    • “In devising the plan of the library building, you have contemplated its indefinite extension to meet the growth of the collections,” said Mellen Chamberlain at the dedication of Wilson Hall as the school library (Google Books).

    • “Areas of potential historic interest include theoriginal center of Town; the well field of the old Aqueduct Company south of the Greensboro Road; the Granite Quarry south of Greensboro Road; the Tilton Quarry east of Moose Mountain Road and one of the earliest slate quarries on the old Tisdale property” (Hanover Master Plan pdf).

    • Finding churches that have been put to interesting new uses is just too easy, so further examples will not be added to the post here that arguing that Rollins should be turned into a library. There is a pub in a former church in Nottingham, England, and a brewery and pub in a former church in Pittsburgh, where a Romanesque nave makes an impressive beer hall.

    • The Hanover Master Plan (pdf) also recommends National Register listing for various districts including the campus.

    • This has probably been posted here before, but Yale has construction photos and a slick video of the two new residential colleges it is building.

    • The Dartmouth has an article on near-future construction projects.

    • Not much is coming out about Thayer School’s master plan. “Because the college owns Tuck Drive, any attempt to better align it with West Street will have to wait until Dartmouth’s own building plans in the area are finalized, she said” (referring to Vicki Smith, Hanover’s senior planner) (Valley News).

    More notes about chapels and libraries

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    Back in 2012 a post here proposed (1) the construction of an excellent nondenominational chapel primarily for the use of the few student religious groups that do not have their own worship spaces, and (2) the sensitive reuse of the underused Rollins Chapel as a library.

    I.   Since then, some remarkable examples of reused churches have turned up. The Times has an article on a 1928 Dutch chapel turned into a house. The big staircase structure placed in the nave seems to work — it makes the room livable and signals its difference from the rest of the building without dominating or appearing permanent.

    Check out this astonishing church in Berlin (Bing aerial) that’s being reused as a museum (New York Times Magazine). Frankly, it seems as if it has looked like a museum or a factory all along.

    II.   Here are photos of two of the churches-into-libraries mentioned previously:

    Library of Lincoln College, Oxford. Meacham photo.


    All Saints Church, Oxford (18th century), now the library of Lincoln College.


    Library of St. Edmund Hall, Oxford. Meacham photo.


    St. Peter-in-the-East, Oxford (12th century), now the library of St. Edmund Hall.

    This is a recent (2008) conversion not mentioned earlier:

    Archives of Balliol College, Oxford. Meacham photo.


    St. Cross Church, Oxford (12th century and later), converted to an archives building for Balliol College. Services apparently still take place in the chancel (Wikipedia).

    III.   Would Edward Ashton Rollins have wanted his chapel to be reused as a library? Almost certainly not. He spoke at the laying of the cornerstone (Exercises at the Laying of the Corner-Stones… in Google Books), and he sounded as if he shared the views of most other New Englanders born in the 1820s:

    Dartmouth College with no Chapel, and no religious worship or instruction, would mean ultimately the cities and villages of our state without churches, and our civilization a delusion and a mockery.

    But of course the building of a new chapel would satisfy his first condition, and the Tucker Foundation continues to support the second. Rollins Chapel will always stand at the center of Dartmouth, whatever its function, and the proposal in the post would ensure that the college will always have an active chapel on campus. Events such as the Baccalaureate Service, whose concluding procession Corinne Arndt Girouard depicted in this wonderful photograph, will always have a dignified and dedicated building in which to take place:

    Indeed the Tucker Foundation is undergoing changes of its own, being split by the college trustees into a religious group and a public-service group (The Dartmouth). In the long term, especially as smaller faith groups continue to obtain their own worship spaces, it is difficult to see how the split in the foundation would lead to more religious use for Rollins rather than less, but who knows?

    It is worth noting that the little overview of the upcoming master plan on the Beyer Blinder Belle site states that “strategies include optimizing the reuse of existing buildings through space assessments.” And that the college’s architectural staff now includes a space planner.

    Report from the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter

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    Several posts here over the past few years have commented on the redevelopment of what’s called the Radcliffe Observatory Quarter in Oxford, comparing it to Hanover’s own hospital district north of Maynard.

    Rafael Viñoly Architects devised a 2008 master plan for the area that appears in an aerial view before the makeover:

    • The Oxford University Press building is visible at the right, outside the quarter.
    • That church opposite the Press (St. Paul’s) was a coffee shop/bar called FREVD that served as an example here in the Rollins Chapel reuse post.
    • Just beyond the church is the future site of the building of the Blavatnik School of Government (founded 2010, Wikipedia). Circle-in-a-square buildings do have a special history here, but even a person with some fondness for spaceship buildings could find something to quibble with in this project by Herzog & de Meuron.

    Oxford Blavatnik site Meacham photo

    Blavatnik site, with St. Paul’s at left

    Oxford Blavatnik site Meacham photo

    View of construction site through hoarding

    Oxford Blavatnik site Meacham photo

    View of site from west: Templeton Green College, with Observatory

    The broad approach taken by the university as developer is interesting: there was archeology beforehand (Neolithic ring ditches!) and during construction there was an artist in residence and a set of public art presentations.

    —–

    [Update 07.20.2014: View through hoarding added. Thanks to Hugin for panoramic image software.]

    More on the sensitive reuse of churches by colleges

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    This superb Doric temple is one of my favorite Richmond buildings:

    Built in 1841 as the First Baptist Church, it was designed by Thomas U. Walter, who would go on to design the dome of the U.S. Capitol (Wikipedia).

    The church is now a student center for the Medical College of Virginia. The rear facade, which faces the school, has a nice addition with a new main entrance that allows the front to remain untouched:


    Images from Google Street View.

    Medical students looking for a place to worship share the hospital’s chapel, built in 1981 as a nondenominational space: “Rounded walls, adaptable seating and a lack of religious icons offer a place for the whole community,” according to a 2010 news brief.

    —–

    [Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to Hunton page replaced.]

    The new campus map is out; other topics

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    • That Occom Ridge house that was captured in a state of extreme disarray in various aerials has indeed been replaced by a new house by Haynes & Garthwaite. Bing has a more recent aerial view.
    • The graduate and professional schools’ heraldry is on display on the college’s new website. The graduation gowns of the schools also carry uniform shields now, with Flickr examples of Tuck, Thayer, and Graduate Studies. The Trustees get the Old Pine.
    • The Planner has a post presenting the new campus map. This is an almost-final version of the traditional paper map. It’s notable that the two freestanding lounge buildings in the Choates are given their own names, Brittle and Bissco, for the first time on a campus map. I lived in the Choates during the early ’90s and don’t recall those names being used, even informally.
    • The Friends of Hanover Crew have a new design for the site. It is hard to remember, but the prior design might have made more use of Wilson’s Landing Road.
    • Thanks to Melvin I. Smith for the citation to the Old Division Football paper in his Evolvements of Early American Foot Ball: Through the 1890/91 Season (2008).
    • The Rauner Blog has a nice post on the dedication of Rollins Chapel and Wilson Hall. It’s always interesting to see this fraternal twin to Rollins, designed by the same architect (John Lyman Faxon) in Newton, Mass. (See also the Bing view.)


    Repurposing Rollins

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    The seeming underuse of Rollins Chapel prompts one to ask whether it is finally time to devote the building to a more productive function; whether Dartmouth, without damaging the building or making a change that cannot be undone, should use Rollins for some purpose that serves the academic mission of the school.

    Rollins would make a fantastic library reading room or simply a study space, for example. Students would actually have a reason to experience the building on a regular basis and appreciate its recent restoration.

    Churches have been turned into libraries at Haverford College in Pennsylvania (below); at St. Edmund’s Hall in Oxford (St. Peter in the East, see interior photo provided by the college); and at Lincoln College in Oxford (All Saints Church, see interior photo by Martin Beek). And from the photos (more), the Modernist bookstore inserted by Merkx + Girod into a 13th century church in Maastricht is simply astounding.

    Haverford College library interior
    Haverford College library interior.

    Dartmouth would continue to provide worship space, especially for student religious groups that do not have independent student centers and denominational chapels somewhere in town. There is little reason, however, for this generic worship space to occupy a prime site at the heart of a secular institution. To use its resources efficiently and help keep its most-used buildings within ten minutes of the Green, Dartmouth could easily justify the removal of its official worship space to a site that is relatively cheap and distant.

    Dartmouth might consider building a noble and uplifting timber-framed building, simple and undecorated — perhaps in the form of an octagonal or round barn (Wikipedia), a vast English aisled barn (like Harmondsworth Great Barn, in Wikipedia), or a discount version of Thorncrown Chapel. The building might stand between EKT and Tri-Delt, or it could occupy one of the vacant sites west of the President’s House. It would be the sort of place where alums could hold weddings and the college could hold memorials.

    Once the new hall opens, the college could sensitively furnish Rollins as a study space, like the ’02 Room, or as a new home for one of the smaller libraries.

    Rollins Chapel
    Rollins Chapel. See also the excellent interior photo by Stephanie Wales.

    Removing the recent interior lights from the roof trusses would take Rollins closer to its original appearance, and replacing the existing movable chairs with high-quality lighted study tables or carrels would make Rollins into a highly useful building.

    ——

    [Update 05.12.2013: Broken link to Merkx-Girod replaced, additional Maastricht photo link added.]

    [Update 11.04.2012: Jacobs Consultancy, a firm working with the college on the new master plan, provides

    detailed analysis and feasibility testing of the activities and occupants of a facility or complex, coupled with the analysis of existing buildings, their current, plus potential capabilities and capacities. This process identifies shortfalls and excesses in spaces controlled by various occupant groups, and suggests “highest and best use” scenarios with matches and mismatches by current occupants.

    It will be interesting to see what they say about Rollins Chapel.]

    Attributions

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    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.

    Bartlett Hall’s Wheelock Memorial Window, in the bathroom

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    Frances Cha has examined the remarkable Wheelock memorial window in Bartlett Hall in The Dartmouth:

    Wheelock memorial window, Bartlett Hall, Dartmouth College

    The window depicts John the Baptist and quotes him: “Vox Clamantis In Deserto Parate Viam Domini.” In doing so, the window recalls Wheelock’s invocation of that message in his suggestion that the college motto be “Vox Clamantis in Deserto.” (Meacham photo)

    [Update 04.12.2010: Parate inserted.]

    Rollins window controversy, myth

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    College Chaplain Rev. Richard Crocker expects the stained glass windows in Rollins to be repaired beginning during the summer of 2006 according to an interview in the Dartmouth Review.   The Review also prints Kale Bongers’ historically-minded editorial supporting the restoration.

    In his interview, Rev. Crocker related with qualifications the story that the Rollins altar was moved back to the east end during the 1960s and that the sun that shone through the apse windows into the eyes of the audience as a result was part of the reason the school covered the windows.   The pulpit or lectern had been moved to the southeast corner of the crossing in 1912 when the transepts were lengthened and effectively made into a new nave (the hillside blocked any more expansion to the east).

    Stained glass in Rollins

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    As part of a restoration, Facilities Planning will reveal the now-covered stained-glass windows in the apse of Rollins Chapel, The Dartmouth reports. Donors gave each memorial window in the name of a president of the school, the first five (three in the chancel and one in each transept) in 1886 after the building opened according to “Dartmouth College. Description of the Five Memorial Windows in Rollins Chapel,” New York Times (5 March 1886), 8, col. 5.

    • The center window in the chancel is a memorial for President Eleazar Wheelock, made by James Ballantine & Son of Edinburgh, and depicts a group of hearers listening to John the Baptist, also including college motto and seal.
    • The President Brown memorial was made by F.X. Zettier at the Royal Bavarian Stained Glass Works in Munich and depicts the apostle John.
    • The President Tyler memorial was made by Donald McDonald of Boston and depicts the apostle Paul with the usual colors replaced with reds and brown to go with the chapel.
    • The President Lord window, also by McDonald, depicts Moses.
    • The President Smith window, also by McDonald, depicts St. James.

    Other windows have followed, including President Bartlett’s memorial in 1905, a window designed and executed by Tiffany Studios according to The Dartmouth 26 (24 June 1905), 2.

    —–
    [Update 11.10.2012: Broken link fixed.]