Category Archives: site updates

Information about the website Dartmo.: The Buildings of Dartmouth College.

New faculty houses, etc.

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  • Fascinating and unexpected historic New Hampshire mica mine for sale: Eagle Tribune.

  • Bora (formerly Boora) Architects have put up a couple new images and larger versions of their old ones for the Hopkins Center expansion. The new porte-cochere, which would tear down Harrison’s stone wall and put up a transparent box with a glass “curtain” wall, is striking for the literalism of its opening-up of the Hop. The new reference to the project as “unbuilt” is troubling.

  • The Valley News reports on a Cambodian food truck that serves Hanover.

  • Big Green Alert reports on the plaque honoring Kathy Slattery Phillips in the new press box at Memorial Field.

  • Dartmouth Now reports that the board of trustees, at its Commencement meeting,

    affirmed plans to proceed with the renovation and expansion of the Hood Museum of Art. The trustees also voted to approve $10 million for construction of the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge and $22 million to build a new indoor athletics practice facility. Each of these projects will be funded through private gifts to Dartmouth.

  • One of the goals of the current Thayer School fundraising campaign (Dartmouth Now):

    Construct a 180,000-square-foot building, which will nearly double the school’s total floor space. The building, to be located directly south of the MacLean Engineering Sciences Center, will provide more space for classroom teaching and experiential learning, with an emphasis on Thayer’s growing efforts in design and research priorities in energy technology and engineering-in-medicine.

  • The Town of Orford celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding with a reading of its charter on the East Common (Here in Hanover).

  • The Rauner Library Blog reports on a time capsule from 1977 that contained a can of Miller High Life. The can was kept in the archives but had to be drained recently.

  • Thanks to the U.Va. School of Architecture for including the Campus Guide in its 2016 Alumni Exhibit, on university living-learning environments.

  • The Valley News has a story on the Hartford Christian Camp. It sounds like a lovely place, and the kind of summertime experience that was common a century ago. In Charlottesville, Virginia, a similar camp has been incorporated into the city and its surviving cottages have become year-round houses:


  • U.Va. has a collection of campus then/now photos.

  • The Dartmouth has an article on the school’s architecture studio.

  • Big Green Alert reports on the new FieldTurf at Memorial Field.

  • Volunteers in Meriden are digitizing the E.H. Baynes slide archive, the Valley News reports. Baynes was the conservationist and traveling lecturer who, at a talk in Webster Hall during the early 1900s, suggested that Dartmouth students raise money to save the bison and adopt the animal as their mascot.

  • Green Building Advisor has a detailed look at the construction of the four new modular houses being installed for faculty as part of the “house communities” plan. The school has a video update on the construction. Big Green Alert has earlier and later photos of the tensile “community” building that now stands by Davis Varsity House.

  • It is common these days for sportswear companies to design team uniforms, logos, and mascots. For the British team at the 2016 Olympics, Adidas worked with both the College of Arms (England) and the Lord Lyon King of Arms (Scotland) to create a coat of arms that would be conferred by a dual grant (College of Arms news).

A new look for Dartmo.

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After a few days’ outage, this site is up again with a new appearance. The old WordPress theme was not being maintained by its developer and needed to be dropped.

As usual, if you have any news about design or construction projects on campus, you are welcome to send it in to dartmo@gmail.com.

Perdido and more

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  • Jens Larson is on the cover of a Bucknell University magazine from 2009 (pdf). The cover story describes his 1932 master plan in the context of new plan by SBRA.
  • The roof of Alumni Gym over the Michael Pool is to be renovated again (The Dartmouth).
  • Clement Meadmore’s 1978 COR-TEN sculpture Perdido has been installed on East Wheelock Street below South Fayerweather Hall (Hood press release pdf, Flickr photo of installation, Facebook photo).
  • Collis renovations are nearing an end (The Dartmouth), and people are talking about switching fuels for the Heating Plant (The Dartmouth).
  • Bruce Wood discusses the possibility of a hockey game on the turf at Memorial Field (Big Green Alert blog).
  • Rauner presents interesting research on the conch that students blew as a horn instead of ringing a bell during the eighteenth century (Rauner Library Blog).
  • The Valley News has a remembrance of timber framer Edward Levin ’69.
  • Interior demolition soon will begin at 4 Currier, where the college is building a 3,000 s.f. innovation center (The Dartmouth).
  • Telemark Shortline, the sculpture now located in front of Richardson Hall, has an interesting past as described by the Hood Museum:

    Telemark Shortline was originally designed by the artist for a specific site between the Hopkins Center and Wilson Hall on Dartmouth’s campus. When construction commenced on the Hood Museum of Art in 1982, the work was removed. In 2009, it was re-constituted by the artist in its current location. The first part of the title comes from the sculpture’s form, which resembles a deep-snow turn made with a pair of Nordic skis. “Shortline” refers to both the railroad company name (the sculpture’s composition brings to mind railroad tracks) and the artist’s term for the bevel-cut ends of his beams.

  • The post on traffic patterns around the Green has been updated.

Vermont windows

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  • An update of the “North Block” golf course development idea: Take a look at the Perkins + Will plan for the Poplar Point Development In Washington, D.C. Naturally Dartmouth wouldn’t need this density or scale, but it could learn from the extension of the existing street grid to form irregular quadrangular blocks; the treatment of the edge condition (the Anacostia River); and the accommodation of streams flowing through the site.

  • An update of the Hop expansion post: Of course! The new theater and entrance facade represent the final realization of Larson’s old 1940s Hop designs. In this post, a still image from a college video shows how Larson wanted to put a theater and a major entrance to the Hopkins Center on what was then College Street. And the Dartmouth has an article on the Boora project.

  • I did not learn until recently that this memorable window, visible on the way to Hanover from West Leb, is called a “Vermont window” or a “witch window” (Wikipedia):


  • Dartmouth has been phasing out the “@alum.dartmouth.org” accounts and assigning everyone, past and present, an “@dartmouth.edu” address (only the address, not an account). This is neater than the old dual system where students had one address/account and alumni another. When the “@alum.dartmouth.org” accounts came in (during 1995 or 1996?) they seemed like an awkward solution. The rationale for creating the new domain was that Dartmouth was barred (by its interpretation of the government’s pre-ICANN rules, one supposes) from using the “.edu” domain for accounts assigned to anyone but employees and students. Yet Harvard came out with its “@post.harvard.edu” domain around that time, so it is hard to see that as the reason.

    Although it was fun to use Blitzmail after college, the need for a personal, ISP-independent email account was soon satisfied more effectively on the Web by Hotmail (1996) and Yahoo Mail (1997). Students responded with WebBlitz (1998 or 1999?) but I don’t recall that it prevented the alumni accounts from slipping into some obscurity. The susceptibility of the alumni accounts to great volumes of spam did not help.

  • The Rauner Blog has a post on Sgt. Allen Scott Norton of WWI with photos of the trenches dug on the future site of Leverone Field House or Red Rolfe Field.

  • The Planner’s Blog has a post on a new war memorials map.

  • Finally a photo of new Hop entrance below the grand ballroom — and the ever-shrinking Zahm Courtyard. It is included in the war memorial map.

  • The College Steward was a charter office first held by Ebenezer Brewster, who established the tavern that preceded the Inn. I’ve wondered if the office could be revived, and whom it should be given to. Contemporary college statutes from England (Downing College Cambridge, published in 1800, in Google Books) suggest that a steward was the head of dining services:

    STATUTE XI.

    OF THE STEWARD.

    THERE shall also be one Steward appointed annually by the Master, from among the Professors and Fellows, to direct every thing which relates to the Commons and Sizings to be served in the hall at dinner and supper, and the wine and other articles provided in the combination room. He shall make all payments in respect of such Commons and Sizings to the Cook and Butler of the College, at such times as shall be appointed by the Master, and shall receive the same from the Tutor, within one week of the end of every Term, for all his Pupils who have been in Commons during the Term; and for all other persons in Commons, he shall be paid by themselves in the same time.

  • The Grad Studies Office has a photo of the professionally-made sign in its renovated 37 Dewey Field Road. (In the recent interior renovation, references to 37 Dewey Field Road seem to encompass both 37 and 50 Dewey Field Road, the old Homes 37 and 50.)

  • Insignia: From a College Grant photo album (pdf), page 20, we learn that

    The “Diamond D” log brand was stamped with a hammer into all logs leaving the College Grant so they could be identified upon reaching the sawmill.

    Unrelated: The clever Europhilia of Football as Football. And it is funny how the Maryland governor’s “Goals” website logo recalls the RAF roundel:


  • Dartmouth Now has an article on the up-close inspection of the exterior of Baker Tower.

  • Congratulations to The Dartmouth on its new website. Here’s hoping the upgrade doesn’t involve a new URL for every past article. This site has more than 220 broken links to the D at the moment.

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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to Maryland veterans 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.)


Advanced Surgery Center addition to open in summer

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  • The Advanced Surgery Center addition to the north end of the DHMC complex will open this summer (Thayer School News). A presentation about the ASC reveals that it will have a distinct circulation route for animals.
  • Thayer School’s $300 House Project from a while back has been written up in The Guardian:

    After the contest, a workshop was held at Dartmouth University where selected designers and architects further sharpened their ideas. Jack Wilson, team leader at Dartmouth, is now preparing to build two pilot projects in Haiti, one rural and the second urban.

  • Not related to anything on campus, but an interesting idea encountered while perusing aerial views of Berlin, Germany: K.F. Schinkel’s pioneering 1830s Bauakademie building (Wikipedia), demolished by the East Germans, was recreated as a cloth-covered scaffolding in 2005. It appears in current Bing low-angle aerial views.
  • Charlottesville architect William McDonough ’73 (Wikipedia) shares an anecdote about attending a Dartmouth talk by Buckminster Fuller in a blog post at the Times.
  • Phase I of the Collis renovation, focused on the café, is finished (The Dartmouth).
  • The Dartmouth Club of New York (at the 1915 J.G. Rogers clubhouse of the Yale Club) had a pong tournament last month (more).
  • New information about the 2005 SBRA master plan for DHMC is coming to light:

    An analysis revealed that the original DHMC organizational structure is reached its limits, necessitating a new way of organizing the campus. To provide an effective way to unify a larger assemblage of buildings, the master plan proposes a new circulation paradigm, employing a perimeter loop road that provides a sense of orientation and hierarchy to the dispersed building sites on land owned by DHMC and Dartmouth College.

Site updates:

  • The fifteen-year backlog of linkrot has been tackled. All 270 or so broken links have been fixed or eliminated since November. Mobile formatting has been added and the old “Links” page was removed 11.17.2012. The html version of the “Notes toward a Catalog…” was deleted today.
  • Sorry about the login screen popping up for comments. It is not supposed to appear.
  • If this site proves too exciting, head over to the Lamb & Rich, Architects site. Small improvements and sometimes a few discoveries have been creeping into each iteration of the catalog of the firm’s buildings.
  • Please do click on the new advertisements on the right-hand side of this page.
  • Thanks to Bruce at Big Green Alert for linking to the book at Google Books and this site in a post last month about “Dartmouth University.”

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[Update 06.09.2013: Broken link to presentation removed.]

A minor NCAC update and other information

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  • Baker is displaying an exhibit titled Innovation on the Slopes: The Early Years of Skiing at Dartmouth, and the Rauner blog has a post on the historic 1935 J-bar lift at Oak Hill.
  • Dartmouth Now has an article on the Skiway.
  • The Green Building Information Gateway has some information (pdf) on the North Campus Academic Center: The senior associate with architects KSWA is Lena Kozloski and the landscape architect is Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., the same firm that is involved in the campus plan. The building will stand seven stories above grade (presumably on the northwestern facade, with fewer stories visible to the south).
  • The Master of Health Care Delivery Science degree seems to be taking on a Tuck-y flavor with its first investiture (Tuck Today). It is notable that this is the first class to finish the MHCDS program; that the program is not “online” or “mostly online” but “low-residency” (see the chart); that the ceremony took place in January, but that graduates can still participate in Commencement in June; and that the ceremony was held at the Inn. (This photo of the class from Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream seems to be the first photo anywhere to show the new eastern addition to the Inn.)
  • The Valley News reports (limited access) that the Friends of Hanover Crew will have to wait another year for a new dock.
  • The Dartmouth reports that a student-driven coffee stand is opening in Stell Hall.
  • Universitization: Back in 2011 the college lamented the fact that it was ranked “99th by the QS World University Rankings and 90th in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings” (The Dartmouth). The QS rankings for 2012 list a non-“University” at number one and list two “Colleges” among the top six schools. Indeed, four of the top ten schools are named something other than “University.” The current Times rankings place a different school without the word “University” in its name at number one. Three of the top eight are not “Universities.”
  • The Valley News has an article (limited access) on ski jumping in high schools in the Upper Valley.
  • The Concord Monitor and Dartmouth Now report that the Ice Chimes sculpture has been installed by the LSC.
  • The Dartmouth reports on the beginnings of the Boora project to renovate and expand the Hop.
  • The Planner has more information on the Collis renovation.
  • An interesting early Machado & Silvetti design for the VAC and a Hop addition shows up in the portfolio of Seth Clarke Design on pages 42 and 43. That image of the Hop footprint is actually taken from Hopland on this website.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Skiway article repaired.]
[Update 03.03.2013: Some typos and grammar corrected.]

The diminishing supply of Connecticut brownstone and other topics

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  • It is easy to forget that the Rufus Graves who was extremely involved in the college and the town — and who built the first bridge over the river at Hanover — is the same Rufus Graves who was central in the founding of Amherst College (Amherst bio).
  • The New York Times has an article on the closing of the last Connecticut brownstone quarry. The remarkable part of the story is not to much that Portland Brownstone Quarries is closing, but that any of the quarries ever reopened once they closed during the 1940s. (This one apparently reopened during the mid-1990s.) Brownstone was used to entirely cover some collegiate buildings, such as Wesleyan’s Fisk Hall, but it does not seem to have been as popular as red brick and limestone. Harvard might be to blame. It is worth noting that brownstone was a popular trim material for Romanesque buildings, such as Bartlett and Wilson Halls at Dartmouth.
  • The Boston Globe has “a series of New England getaways on public transportation,” and the latest number features idyllic Hanover, New Hampshire. It is good to learn about new restaurants that have sprung up, but it is easy to quibble with the use of “College Green” as a (Dublinesque) place name.
  • One need no longer concern oneself about the faux-antique spelling of the name of the restaunt at “5 Olde Nugget Alley.” The building is now occupied by 3 Guys Basement Barbecue (see the restaurant site, PigTrip review).
  • There is some neat rephotography on the master planning website. (See Shawn Clover’s remarkable composite images of the San Francisco Earthquake, then and now. Via Slate.)
  • The Valley News on the extension of the rail trail to connect downtown Lebanon and West Lebanon.
  • Low-angle or oblique aerial photos of Hanover: there are now many available. Lakes Region Aerial Photo has a good collection. Air Photo North America has a few with the Shower Towers still standing after Kemeny was finished. Aerial Design has lots of photos, including winter shots. Then there is this nice overall view published by Thayer School.
  • The College Planner’s blog has seen a lot of activity lately.
  • Thanks to Bruce for the mention on the Big Green Alert Blog. Both the team and the coverage are particularly exciting this year. Thanks to Kevin G. Quinn for the cite to the Old Division Football paper in Sports and Their Fans: The History, Economics and Culture of the Relationship Between Spectator and Sport (Mcfarland, 2009), 235. Thanks to the master planning staff for the cite to the Campus Guide in the history section of the master planning site.

“Goat Room” and other terms

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  • A thorough post on the use of goats in fraternity imagery covers the use of the term “goat room” to describe a meeting room. That term has been used a number of Dartmouth houses including Tri-Kap, Beta Theta Pi, Phi Gamma Delta, Zeta Psi, Sigma Nu, and Psi Upsilon. The first Goat Room built by Beta is visible at the far right of a photo on the Town’s Flickr photostream.
  • Bob Donin’s 2011 oral history interview with William Jenkins ’43 and his wife Mary contains these linguistic observations on page 18:

    MARY: […] And the other thing that’s interesting—and I’ve talked about this to my few good friends who are still around who grew up here—when we said campus, we meant the Green. And it was never called the Green.

    DONIN: Oh, it wasn’t called the Green back then?

    MARY: Well, at least not by any of us. Never used the word Green. And when we said campus, which was an incorrect use of the word obviously, we meant the Green. I’ll meet you on campus. I’ll meet— you know, use it in that context. And it’s very interesting to see the evolution. And another thing that’s different: When you were in college and I was dating and stuff, the word “frat” was considered to be a state university word, and everyone looked down their nose at it, and they never under any conditions would use the word “frat,” meaning fraternity. And now it’s I think commonly used.

    DONIN: So what did you call—oh, you called it a fraternity.

    MARY: A fraternity. Or by the Greek name.

  • A Valley News blurb refers to plans “for a six-story addition just south of the main entrance” of DHMC, for research. Presumably this is the Williamson Translational Research Center.
  • A nice history of the building of the Ray School.
  • A new Maine Heraldry Blog is promising. Go moose-deer!
  • Rauner Library is allowing visitors to lick one of the books in its collection.
  • Thanks to Robert Goodby for citing the Notes toward a Catalog… in the 2006 Lebanon Slate Mill conservation study (pdf). Thanks for the citations to Halls, Tombs and Houses by Blake Gumprecht in The American College Town (UMass Press, 2010) and Carole Zellie in the University of Minnesota Greek Letter Chapter House Designation Study (2003). Glad the Review has adopted this site’s analysis of the new Inn addition.
  • Brilliant. Another post in praise of the aerial photo provided by Bing:

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[Update 11.04.2012: Beta photo link added.]

Recent citations

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Thanks to DADA for including the book in the inaugural exhibition. Thanks for citations by Bryant Tolles, in Architecture & Academe: College Buildings in New England before 1860 (UPNE, 2011), and the Rauner Library Blog, in a post on Dartmouth Hall.

Thanks also to T. Barton Thurber for the citation to the Rich thesis in European art at Dartmouth: Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art (UPNE, 2008).

Dartmo.15

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December of 2010 marks the unofficial beginning of this website’s fifteenth year. For the anniversary, I will be posting a bit about the history of the site and will try to clear the shelves of a few old and unfinished article ideas:

  1. The Upper Valley Subway Map
  2. The full text of William C. Hill’s Dartmouth Traditions (1901)
  3. The Indian origins of “When Shall We Three Meet Again?”
  4. A non-proposal for dividing Dartmouth into a federation of residential colleges
  5. The gates of Dartmouth
  6. The other Hopkins Center

Thanks to Alex Hanson for the coverage in the Valley News.

[Update 01.16.2011: Links to items 3 and 5 and coverage added; post made non-sticky and publication date changed from December 1, 2010 to January 16, 2011 to put it in order.]

[Update 01.22.2011: “This month” changed to “December of 2010” for clarity. Capitalization changed in titles.]

dartmo 15 logo

A history of Dartmo.com

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In the spring of 1995, I started posting webpages on a server where I had space as a student. Some of the pages had observations on Dartmouth architecture. This is an example:

thumbnail of old web page

After graduating, I put up some of the information on a new server (I think it was at alaska.net) and titled the collection “DArch.” The name came from a manila folder that held a few clippings related to Dartmouth architecture. I compiled notes on all the buildings I could learn about and put up what I called notes toward a catalog of Dartmouth buildings during December of 1995.

thumbnail of old web page thumbnail of old web page

Versions of the site from the fall of 1999, winter of 2002, and fall of 2003 (all originally at meachams.com) show a search for a standard identity as the site became more bloglike:

thumbnail of old web page thumbnail of old web page thumbnail of old web page

I had no good answer to the question of how to pronounce the name “DArch,” and so I renamed the site “Dartmo.” in 2003 and gave it its own domain name.

Throughout I have tried to keep up a slow pace of posting bits of information about Dartmouth that I find interesting. The original posts were dated vaguely and posted in sequence by hand on two or three long web pages. After weblogs became popular, I turned each of the original posts into a blog post and gave it an arbitrary sequential date within a month of its actual posting.

The site kept a standard appearance from February of 2005 until April of 2010, when the effort of maintaining the site’s idiosyncracies within WordPress became too much of a hassle:

thumbnail of old web page

Over the years the site has been cited, plagiarized, hacked, and infringed upon. The most popular element has been the “Notes toward a Catalog,” which was mostly written in 1995. It is now outdated, poorly-formatted, somewhat error-ridden, and largely supplanted by other sources. I would get rid of it if it weren’t linked by outside sites. The Campus Guide in print or on Google Books is a better source in most cases.

The best way to pull in information seems to be to put out information, and the site has helped a great deal with both the Campus Guide (2008) and the ongoing Lamb & Rich monograph. Great information has come from a large number of people, especially Hanover-area residents not connected with the college. In fact the college has been fairly quiet: I have always hoped for scoops but cannot recall getting any. Once, a few years ago, the development office even started sending corrections through a third party. Dear Development Office: Don’t worry, I won’t be offended. Please send your corrections (and scoops) to dartmo@gmail.com.

What’s in the future? I expect to cut back even more on posting and devote more time to the book. The growth of the Web, particularly the advent of on-line construction press releases and newspaper articles, has made this site generic and untimely. I am still collecting information for a general encyclopedia along the lines of The Encyclopedia of South Carolina or The Encyclopedia of Chicago, but again that would be in print instead of on line. These days it is difficult to imagine the scale of the campus expansion that took place or was planned during the early 2000s, but if the pace of construction were to pick up again in Hanover, the news might be too interesting not to write about.

dartmo 15 logo

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[Update 11.11.2012: Three sentences reworded slightly for clarity.]
[Update 03.19.2012: Two sentences reworded slightly.]
[Update 01.22.2011: Domain name info added.]

The Dartmouth Arms

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Jonathan Good wrote a proposal for a heraldic coat of arms for Dartmouth College in 1995. This website has linked to Good’s pamphlet at several locations over the years and is happy to host it once again.

As the proposal explains, the new symbol would be an adjunct to the existing coat of arms rather than a replacement for it.

The celebration of Dartmouth’s 250th anniversary in 2019 would be a fine time to adopt the coat of arms. At the last big college celebration of this kind, the 1969 bicentennial, the school adopted the lone pine device that has since become widespread.

The school might even petition the College of Arms for a grant of honorary arms, as has been done by George Washington University and Hampden-Sydney College.

A few of Scott Meacham’s own cut-and-paste efforts to render the proposed arms:

Proposed arms for Dartmouth as designed by Good and depicted by Meacham

Proposed arms for Dartmouth as designed by Good and depicted by Meacham

Proposed arms for Dartmouth as designed by Good and depicted by Meacham

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to HSC page fixed.]
[Update 11.30.2010: GWU link corrected.]

Site updates

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Thanks to Alex Hanson for the mention in “In Hanover, Architects Note A 19th-Century Sensibility,” Valley News (22 November 2008).

The Lamb & Rich monograph page has become a separate blog. Posts related to that project will no longer appear here.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to article removed.]