Category Archives: societies

About fraternities, sororities, co-ed houses, Undergraduate Societies, class societies and their buildings.

Fraternity to demolish historic Webster Avenue house

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Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity is planning to demolish its 1896 house at 11 Webster Avenue. It will submit its application for site plan review to the Planning Board on April 20th.


Historic Sigma Phi Epsilon House at Dartmouth before demolition

11 Webster Avenue in 2005

The clapboard house, attributed to Boston architects Dwight & Chandler, was built for math professor Thomas W.D. Worthen of the Class of 1872. The house was part of an original row of six contemporary faculty dwellings by the same firm.

The society occupied the house for more than 50 years and added the large righthand wing by well-known local architects Alfred T. Granger & Associates in 1958.

The fraternity has obtained a special exception [ZBA Minutes 02.04.2010 pdf] from the zoning board to erect a new building on the site.

Sig Ep’s house is not the most exciting one on the Avenue, but still, the Town should ask the group to document the existing structure before demolishing it (Claremont documents the historic buildings it demolishes).

Better yet, the fraternity should voluntarily document its own house before tearing it down. Although not the same as preservation, it would be better than nothing.

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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken links to two pdfs removed.]
[Update 05.01.2010: Sig Ep at Wisconsin, rebuilding its house after a fire, had to win approval for the design from the local Landmarks Commission. The house is located in a historic district.]

[Update 07.28.2010: The Dartmouth has a drawing of the front facade of the replacement. Planning Board minutes (04.20.2010 pdf) suggest that Domus, Inc. of Etna is participating in the project.]

Some views of recent construction

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A remote tour of recent construction via Google Street View images made around August 4, 2009, judging from the Hop’s marquee:

  • The north end addition to Theta Delta Chi (view to southeast);
  • The east end addition to Gile and rear addition to Hitchcock (view to north showing Gile getting a new copper roof);
  • Fahey Hall (view with Butterfield);
  • The redone Tuck Drive/Tuck Mall intersection (view to north; the Google Maps aerial is older and shows Fahey-McLane under construction);
  • The stair addition to the west end of Bones Gate (view to south showing unobtrusive one-bay addition);
  • The Zeta Psi addition (view to south showing front of building with addition under construction);
  • The Chi Gamma Epsilon fire stair (view to north showing roofed but unenclosed fire escape — wonder why other houses didn’t do this if they could get away with it);
  • Kemeny-Haldeman (view to east; Carson terminates Webster Avenue and is framed by Haldeman and Carpenter);
  • The addition to Tabard (view to south showing rear of building; the Google driver went down this unnamed alley by the Choates before thinking better of it);
  • The addition to Phi Delta Alpha (view to south showing rear of interesting, almost agricultural addition);
  • The new Phi Tau (view to southeast showing side; the end view to the north shows the building’s interesting proportions);
  • Berry Row (view “down” to the south);
  • The McLaughlin Cluster (view of “outside” to the northeast; views “down” to southwest and “up” to northeast).
  • The New Hampshire Hall additions (view to southwest showing east end addition); and
  • “Whittemore Green” behind Thayer School (views of landscape including flowers and curving paths; hmmm).

Varied topics in history and architecture

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The Neukom Institute was rumored last year to be considering a request for an addition to Sudikoff.

Ledyard Canoe Club plans to rebuild Titcomb Cabin, which burned last spring. The logs will be put in the river at the Organic Farm and rafted down to Gilman Island. This will be the closest thing to a log drive seen on this stretch of the Connecticut in many years.

David Hooke (Reaching That Peak, 1987) gave a “smoke talk” in Commons on the Outing Club’s history. The Dartmouth reports that “smoke talk” refers to the club’s journal Woodsmoke, but it might also refer to the informal lectures of that name that took place in College Hall at the turn of the century.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates that, although not mentioning it, helps explain their Berry Library project.

Check out the buildings in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream.

The Dartmouth is doing a weekly articles on Dartmouth out-of-town, starting with the riding center at Morton Farm.

Dartmouth is offering for rent the second level of the 1910s library stacks addition to Eleazar Wheelock’s house. This could make a good society hall:

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to VSBA page fixed; broken link to rental page removed.]

The Visual Arts Center will open in 2012

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The college finished the renovations of two old buildings for sororities (The Dartmouth), is still planning to go ahead with a small number of other projects (The Dartmouth) including the Visual Arts Center (The Dartmouth).

The latest Capital Projects Schedule [pdf] has construction starting early next spring and finishing in September of 2012. The architects have not reinstated their initial page for the project.

Various publications

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An aerial film made for promotional purposes shows the campus nicely.

An oral history of Dartmouth in World War II is available from the archives.

UPNE has published The Great River about the Connecticut River (UPNE, Valley News).

A photograph from this website showing Yale’s Book & Snake temple is the frontispiece in Stephen White’s new novel The Siege, set at Yale University.

Society house renovations

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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.]

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.

Fraternity addition update

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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.]

Organizations and publications

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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.

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[Update 05.11.2013: Broken link to Parents News article on Hill Winds removed.]
[Update 11.12.2012: Broken link to documentary replaced.]

Tri-Kap expansion planned

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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.]

Latest fraternity additions

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The Fuller Audits conducted under the Student Life Initiative about ten years ago pointed out the building-code failings of each student society house. Almost every fraternity, sorority, or co-ed house needed an enclosed exterior fire stair and possibly an elevator. Since then, the College has altered or added onto the nine or so society houses it owns, one society has built itself a new house, and about sixteen other groups have been working independently to add to their own houses.

The variety of approaches is relatively small. Long brick buildings designed as fraternities usually get extended at one end, while frame houses closer to a square or a tee in plan are given a rear ell. Almost every addition is “contextual” and attempts to harmonize with the building to which it is attached. The two latest additions represent the extremes.

Theta Delta Chi is extending to the north its north-south oriented building adjacent Thayer Dining Hall using a design by the Portland, Maine firm of Arcadia Designworks. Arcadia’s outlook is broader than most — the firm also handles industrial design and apparently created an improved lobster trap — and its addition to Theta Delt is unusually “contemporary” in style.

Theta Delta Chi addition

The extension avoids both the brick construction and the roof form of the historic house designed by Putnam & Chandler of Boston. If Hanover had a Design Review Commission, as many cities these days do, it probably would not approve this addition.

Zeta Psi, on the other hand, has commissioned a firm intimately familiar with the work of Jens Larson (Smith & Vansant Architects of Norwich) to expand its house in several directions. Saucier & Flynn, the College’s landscape architects, are handling the landscape design. The conceptual drawings (pdf) include floorplans bearing a notation rarely seen in architecture, an indication of the designers’ familiarity with the client: “Pong tables shown for scale.” The alterations include an extension to the west end of the house and a new gable over the two-level portico at the rear. Hanover’s zoning authorities have approved the project (pdf).

Zeta Psi addition

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Smith & Vansant fixed; broken link to 6 March 2008 zoning board minutes removed.]

General construction update

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In general construction news, Guy C. Denechaud writes that “Projects Are Plentiful at Dartmouth College,” Valley Business Journal (April 7, 2008).

The Valley News reports that the fieldhouse at Burnham, called the Sports Pavilion, is open as the clubhouse for the soccer and lacrosse teams. The school will add an athletic trainers’ facility to the north side of the building in the future.

Alpha Theta is also working on repairs to comply with the Fuller Audit.

The Dartmouth reports that Bartlett Hall is being rehabilitated.

New Hampshire Hall’s exterior was photographed prior to the expansions that is under way now.

College buys two Larson houses for campus groups

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Dartmouth’s design office updated its complete list of projects in December (pdf). Renovations of New Hampshire Hall and the Inn are in the works, along with the creation or upgrading of a multipurpose sports field.

Dartmouth has also bought and is renovating the neighboring houses at 25 and 27 South Park Street and plans to rent each one to a sorority. Alpha Xi Delta will move from Webster Avenue, where it has rented the Beta Theta Pi House, and Alpha Phi will occupy a house for the first time, The Dartmouth reports. Both have been identified as designs of Jens Larson.

25 South Park

This is the front (west) facade of number 25.

27 South Park

This is number 27. To the right at number 29 is Fire & Skoal, also a Larson design.

27 South Park

The houses screen Thompson Arena.