Category Archives: Thayer School

Cemetery viaduct to be built

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The Valley News reports that Hanover residents voted on Tuesday for the zoning amendment that the college had requested as part of a project related to Thayer School expansion.

Residents also approved an amendment that would allow development near or in a cemetery in some circumstances. The official zoning amendment proposal form (pdf) supplies this detail:

Providing direct pedestrian access from the parking structure and Thayer campus to the College’s administrative offices, Mass Row, 53 Commons and downtown is desirable to the Town and College. In order to accommodate an elevated pedestrian walkway, construction of footings [in the Dartmouth Cemetery] is anticipated.

While the former parking deck idea is not a part of this zoning change, a parking structure certainly would be an important terminus for such a viaduct. The Planning Board minutes of 2 February 2016 (pdf), written back when the parking deck was a hot topic, say:

A pathway is also proposed from a proposed parking facility to the Green, to enhance connectivity of the west campus to the main campus, and to provide easy off-highway access from the proposed parking facility to the Green.

Aha. The viaduct that Larson proposed during the late 1920s, shown on his 1928 master plan, looks set to become a reality. (See also the Westway proposal here.)

Detail of Larson 1928 master plan

Detail of 1928 plan with viaduct lined in red

The map associated with the zoning amendment gives a general idea of the route of the new work, with the viaduct shown as a dashed orange line through the cemetery:

Planning Board map from April 2016 video

Map from “Hanover Planning Board Changes April 2016” video at 9:37 mark

The viaduct presumably will be an extension of Cemetery Lane, the road known until relatively recently as Sanborn Lane. (The map above also shows the realignment of the bottom of Engineering Drive at West Wheelock Street and the reconfiguration of the turnaround at the end of Tuck Mall.)




Keats and Yeats are on your side; Street View image from Google.

The cemetery gate, minus the unfortunately-located parking signage, would make a nice entrance to the viaduct. Here’s hoping the bridge is a work of the engineer’s art worthy of this historic place and its Classical monuments of carved stone. Wilson Architects, the firm that appears to be designing the Thayer building, designed a set of impressive campus pedestrian bridges at Vanderbilt University (a view of one, a view of another).

This will not be the first bridge in the cemetery: during the early 1880s, the cemetery association spanned the northern ravine with a timber bridge. It shows up on this 1890 map and a photo was reproduced in Dartmouth Now. It became unsafe and was removed by the 1920s.

———-

[Update 05.16.2016: Reference to Dartmouth Now added and historic bridge re-described as being of timber, not iron.]

[Update 05.12.2016: Note about dashed orange line added.]

Computer Science Department to move to new Thayer School building

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Google Street View


rendering of new Thayer School building from Behind the Green Newsletter 2 March 2016

The new building is on the left. Image from Behind the Green newsletter.

The Thayer School of Engineering is planning to expand its faculty, students, and program. They are working closely with our Planning, Design & Construction Office to design a building that will accommodate this growth. The project is being developed in partnership with the Computer Science department and will therefore accommodate the relocation of that department, promoting interaction and collaboration between Thayer and CS, and with Tuck as well. The proposed new building is located south of the Maclean Engineering Sciences Center on the west end of the Dartmouth campus.

That from the Campus Services newsletter.1”A Sampling of Capital Projects Underway,” Behind the Green (2 March 2016) pdf.

The building takes its cues from the successful MacLean ESC next door. It looks as if it will line up directly with the portico of Tuck Hall.

The building also carries on the Thayer tradition of erecting additions rather than freestanding buildings. This is contrary to the two most recent master plans for this area. The road seems to be rerouted at least; will the connection to the River Cluster be eliminated completely?

And who will take over Sudikoff once CS leaves?

The newsletter also has a small rendering of the upcoming Indoor Practice Facility.

——————————

 

References
↑1 ”A Sampling of Capital Projects Underway,” Behind the Green (2 March 2016) pdf.

Houses update, parking garage discussion

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Detail of House Center B rendering from OPDC video

Detail of rendering of House Center B shown in OPDC video

  • Dartmouth Now has a post on “Founders’ Day,” the day when “students gathered at Baker-Berry Library to receive personalized letters indicating their membership in one of the six new house communities” (see also photos). Each House gets a different color: probably arbitrary, but not much more arbitrary than most of the House names.

  • The Valley News has an article by Tris Wykes on Thompson Arena’s 40 years.

  • The Thayer School construction project of the future sounds like an expansion rather than a new building, which would fit with the Thayer tradition. (See the Planning Board minutes 2 February 2016 pdf.)

  • There is lots of talk about the Thayer School parking structure proposed for the intersection of Thayer Drive and West Wheelock Street (Valley News).

  • “A pathway is also proposed from a proposed parking facility to the Green, to enhance connectivity of the west campus to the main campus, and to provide easy off-highway access from the proposed parking facility to the Green” (Planning Board minutes 2 February 2016 pdf).

  • “The College has no plans to undertake construction for the School of Graduate and Advanced Studies, though administrators are exploring options for establishing a designated community space for graduate students” Dartmouth Now).

  • The college’s Flickr photostream has a picture of the temporary fence recently erected on North Main Street.

  • The Valley News ran a photo that it described this way:

    Garrett Hubert, of Newport, is the first to carry the torch during the 30-mile run, roller-ski and ski relay to Newport from Hanover on Friday. A relay team re-enacted the solo trip John McCrillis took in 1916 when he skied to Newport from Dartmouth College to attend the town’s first Winter Carnival. David McCrillis, left, is McCrillis’ grandson.

A Thayer garage on Wheelock Street?

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  • Planning for the Sestercentennial is starting in earnest (Dartmouth Now).

  • Check out the West Wheelock massing study by UK Architects, part of the gateway district process.

  • The locker rooms in the Sports Pavilion, one of the only buildings on campus that is not named for anyone, are slated for enlargement (Valley News interview with Harry Sheehy).

  • The school has considered expanding Thompson Arena by excavating under the stands (Valley News interview with Harry Sheehy).

  • The Rauner Blog has a post on the centenary of the death of Richard N. Hall.

  • Don’t forget about the 1966 Webcam on the roof of the Inn.

  • The Dartmouth song “Son of a Gun for Beer” would seem to share a history with this song about the Hebron YMCA recorded on a wax cylinder and described as a Harvard song. “A Son of a Gun” with its current arrangement by Crane appeared in the 1898 Dartmouth songbook attributed to an anonymous author1Edwin Osgood Grover and Addison Fletcher Andrews, Dartmouth songs: a new collection of college songs (1898), 60. Historian Patricia Averill connects the song’s origin to the “Itsy Bitsy Spider”! That song originated in 1817 as “The Rambling Soldier” and was published in 1870 referencing a “son of a gambolier.”2Patricia Averill, Camp Songs, Folk Songs (author, 2014), 232 There is an 1891 reference to “A son of a gambolier, / A son of a gun for beer.”3Henry Collins, “Notes from an Engineers’ Camp,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (September 1891), 374, available at Google Books. Georgia Tech’s “Rambling Wreck” version was printed in 1908.4Averill.

  • Thayer School is thinking of putting a parking garage on West Wheelock Street in place (presumably) of the college-owned apartment buildings there (Planning Board minutes 17 November 2015 pdf). Interesting!

  • Neat topics that are covered in Wikipedia: moonlight towers, low-background steel, Manhattanhenge, ghost stations, trap streets and other fictitious entries (copyright traps), and freedom of the city.

  • In the discussions of Dartmouth’s Lone Pine let’s not forget another piece of stylized vegetation from the Sixties: the flag of Canada.

  • Details on the Baker Tower renovation (Planning Board minutes 3 November 2015 pdf):

    The project includes: replacing the roof, restoring windows, replacing clock
    controls/hands/glass, replacing lighting and addressing issues with lighting, installing electronic controls for the bells, replacing the spire, stopping water infiltration, and cleaning masonry grout.

———

 

References
↑1 Edwin Osgood Grover and Addison Fletcher Andrews, Dartmouth songs: a new collection of college songs (1898), 60.
↑2 Patricia Averill, Camp Songs, Folk Songs (author, 2014), 232
↑3 Henry Collins, “Notes from an Engineers’ Camp,” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (September 1891), 374, available at Google Books.
↑4 Averill.

Thayer new building details

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Thayer School news from the Valley News:

In 2017, administrators hope to break ground on a new building for the Thayer School of Engineering, located near the Tuck School of Business at the western end of campus.

Joseph Helble, dean of the Thayer School, said the expansion would help to accommodate rising numbers of students and faculty, as well as increased need for lab and office space.

“Our undergraduate enrollments have grown tremendously, roughly doubling over the past 5 years, so we are in need of more classroom space, including ‘project labs’ where students work on open-ended, hands-on design projects, usually in teams,” he said in an email Sunday.

The new building would be built in place of the parking lot south of the Thayer complex, according to Hogarty, who said the cost of the project had not been fixed but was planned to come entirely through donations.

History, buildings, etc.

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  • The Rauner blog has posts on Memorial Field, dorm room plans, fraternity meeting minutes, the WWI trenches around Leverone’s site, and class day clay pipes.

  • A Review interview with Thayer School’s Senior Associate Dean Ian Baker says:

    In addition to serving as the Associate Dean, Baker also chaired a community board overseeing and discussing the construction of a new building for the engineering school. The new building will be located next to MacLean where the parking lot is. “We have yet to figure out where the car park goes,” Baker mentioned, wryly suggesting that it was the only problem in the plan. Baker also serves on several academic boards for the school.

    The trustees approved a Thayer School parking garage on the Cummings Lot site back in February of 2002 (post).

  • An actual historic preservation campaign has sprung up at Dartmouth: Save Moosilauke.

  • The 65 Bunkhouse is finished, photos of the decication.

  • Nice black-and-white photos of Hanover architecture by Trevor Labarge are on line. The post office pediment looks quite grand, almost Londonesque.

  • The Hanover Conservancy is thinking about Kendal’s expansion onto the Chieftain property

  • The Valley News is covering the ongoing negotiations over construction of a palliative care center near DHMC and Boston Lot Lake.

  • The Williamson seems to be wrapping up (2014 press release, Turner Construction page).

  • ORW Landscape Architects and Planners of WRJ has been acquired by Greenman – Pedersen, Inc. of New York (pdf). ORW designed the recent improvements to the sidewalk and porte-cochere of the Inn (pdf).

  • The Norwich ad firm called Flannel created Dartmouth’s polished Strategic Plan website and others.

  • The story of how Glasgow football club Partick Thistle F.C. (Wiki) got its new mascot is almost as odd as the mascot itself.

  • Old Division Football (“the Usual Game”) seems a bit like the Florentine calcio storico (New York Times).

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).

Graphic design, history, Friendly’s

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  • Take a look at this fascinating 19th-century photograph of the rear of Dartmouth Row. It is dated to the pre-1904 period, but judging from the tents, one might guess that it was taken in 1869, at the time of the centennial celebration. Younger alumni, many of them Civil War vets, were housed here in tents borrowed from the Army. And take a look at the small building on the left — is that a Temple of Cloacina, an ephemeral outhouse? Middle Fayerweather Hall stands in that area now.

  • The push to apply the nickname “The Woods” to Memorial Field continues (see the Big Green Alert Blog). What about fashioning some of the walls of the replacement stands from board-formed concrete (ConcreteNetwork.com)? What about incorporating a couple of precast concrete columns in the shape of trees?

  • The Rauner Blog has an interesting post on John Smith, a 1773 graduate, Preceptor of Moor’s Charity School, early Tutor at Dartmouth, and Trustee.

  • Campus Planning & Facilities has a collection of articles on the Grant.

  • It turns out the football team last spring ran a uniform design contest through the same website that Graduate Studies used to design their coat of arms, 99designs. The winning football uniform design includes lots of Lone Pines, including on the shoulders and the back of the helmet; most interesting is the Pine on the palm of each glove. The design brief says “We would also like to see some designs that incorporate the ‘Lone Pine’ (pictured below) on the shoulders or in any creative way, similarly to Oregon’s ‘feathers’ on the shoulders of their jerseys.” The brief mentions the state motto but not the school motto, strangely.

  • Back in August The Dartmouth had an article on Bruce Wood, maestro of the Big Green Alert site and its blog companion Big Green Alert Daily.

  • The Rauner Blog also has posts on General Thayer’s gift of his library; the catalogs of Dartmouth College and Dartmouth University; and an 1829 letter from Joseph Dow describing the college.

  • The Valley News announces that Friendly’s in West Leb is closing. I’ll never forget the disappointment on the face of a logician friend when he learned that the “ham and turkey pot pies” that our server mentioned among the dinner specials were actually nothing more than ham pot pies and turkey pot pies.

  • Cognitive Marketing designed the Thayer School shield.

  • Check out the May 1957 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine. The issue features Harrison’s initial design for the Hopkins Center. The plan is all there, but the details are changed. The view on pages 22 and 23 shows the long north-south corridor in a different form. The Barrows Rotunda, the cylindrical exhibition space in the front facade? It looks like it was descended from an unroofed two-level glass-walled shaft that features in this 1957 design — it was meant to go right through the middle of the Top of the Hop.

  • For Larson’s prior design for the Hop, see the December 1946 Alumni Magazine, beginning on page 11.

  • Tuck’s 2008 visual identity guide is available as a pdf. It’s cute that it calls the green color “Tuck green.” The book specifies the Sabon and Frutiger typefaces.

  • The athletics Graphic Standards Manual of 2005 is also available as a pdf. Now we know whom to blame for the gigantic TM connected with the green D logo (page 3). It is interesting that in addition to Dartmouth Green (PMS 349 C), this book also defines Dartmouth Black (Pro Black C) (page 11). The primary, “athletic” typeface is not named, but the secondary typeface is specified as Gill Sans Bold.

    The authors of the manual are SME Inc., the firm that created a shield for Manhattan College and the MLS logo with the boot striking the ball. (As an aside, that MLS logo recently was replaced by a shield designed by Athletics and Berliner Benson. A post at Brand New shows the shield partitioned by an almost typographical line that hangs over the border like the tail of a letter Q.)

    • Siting a new building for Thayer School

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    The Dartmouth reports that Wilson Architects is “exploring potential designs and locations” for a new Thayer School building:

    The parking lot is the most obvious site, Helble said, though it would create a need for another parking facility elsewhere.

    The firm will present its report in January. Wilson Architects, of Boston, has worked on a design for the renovation of Fairchild Hall.

    BASIC at 50 and other items

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    • Work continues on the Williamson Translational Research Building at the hospital in Lebanon. Here is a notable tidbit about the building’s namesake donor, the late Dr. Peter Williamson ’58: he once owned the ultimate collector car, Lord Rothschild’s Bugatti Atlantic. Williamson’s car won the Pebble Beach Concours in 2003 and is now in the Mullin Automotive Museum.

    • The Rauner Blog post on E.E. Just has a great old photo of Hallgarten. The building was built for the state ag school, known then as N.H.C.A.M.A., and its rear ell is the only part of any building from the campus to survive. The school later moved to Durham and became U.N.H., as its football website points out (via Big Green Alert). Of course, the most meaningful fact that relates to the football rivalry is that Dartmouth’s Memorial Field, indeed the entirety of its athletic complex west of Park Street, was built on one of the state farm fields. The students of the N.H.C.A.M.A. learned how to raise crops in the place where Dartmouth students now play football.

    • A group called Project VetCare is buying a house in Hanover, apparently around 65-75 Lebanon Street, to provide housing for veterans, including students (The Dartmouth).

    • Dartmouth Medicine has had a redesign by Bates Creative.

    • Wouldn’t it be interesting if the U.S. had national food appellations (Wikipedia) beyond the grape-growing regions designated by the AVA? There simply is no equivalent to the geographical indications and traditional specialities of the EU (PDO, PGI, TSG), the AOC of France, or the DOC of Italy. Not all traditional foods are old — Birmingham Balti has been proposed for the list of U.K. foods given protected status, and farmed Scottish salmon is already listed.

    • Kendal has demolished the Chieftain (Valley News).

    • Crouching Spider is going away (Flickr).

    • Dartmouth has talked about changing the name of the overall institution — the umbrella under which the undergraduate college and the graduate and professional schools operate — from Dartmouth College to Dartmouth University. The purpose would be to raise the school’s standing among observers, mostly outside the West, for whom “college” can mean a secondary school or lower school. A fascinating example of this renaming motive is found in Trinity College Dublin, another school that has landed outside the top 125 in the Times World University Rankings. Trinity was founded in 1592 (Wikipedia) as a constituent college of the University of Dublin. What makes Trinity odd is that the University never added any other colleges — Trinity is all there is, and yet the university administration survives, under its own name. Trinity’s rebranding now proposes to replace “Trinity College Dublin” with “Trinity College, University of Dublin.” Oh well; at least the “improved” name seems historically-grounded and technically accurate. Brian M. Lucey argues against it in a blog post, and another post. The real controversy in the rebranding involves the coat of arms:

    • Although the Irish Times claims that the Bible is being removed from Trinity’s arms, that does not necessarily appear to be the case. According to an informative paper by Professor John Scattergood (pdf, via Brian M. Lucey), the arms, as formally granted in 1901, require “a Bible closed, clasps to the dexter.” The rebranding includes a new, stylized version of the coat of arms that substitutes an open book, something that easily could be called “a Bible open.” Visually, neither one of the shields identifies the book to the ordinary observer. The changes in colors are all part of the stylization and do no violence to the underlying historic coat of arms. (The University of Dublin obtained its own arms in 1862, and they contain an open book, incidentally.)

    • UNH has picked a new logo, a shield designed by Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. This shield is not one of the three shields that the firm initially proposed last year (post). Although a couple of those first ideas were intriguing, students and alumni were not pleased. The new identity guide (pdf) notes that “The specific blue color has been made a bit brighter than the past version.”

    • Just for your information, the maximum number of effective footnotes in a Word document (Word:Mac 2008) is 32,768. Notes above that number fail gracefully: they still work but are numbered incorrectly, all sharing either the number 32768 or one of a few numbers after that.

    • The school’s Flickr feed has a nice set of historic photos titled “BASIC at 50: The Democratization of Computing.” It is especially gratifying to see the buildings identified: the College Hall basement, Kiewit, and so on. (In the lower right corner of another view of Kiewit is a glimpse of someone who could have been a predecessor of Usenet celebrity and campus character Ludwig Plutonium.)

    • This fantastic photo of President Kemeny with his BASIC license plate was taken in the parking lot east of Bradley/Gerry, it appears, and has the rear addition of the Church of Christ for a backdrop (somewhat near this present-day Google Street View).

    • From an article in The Dartmouth on planning VP Lisa Hogarty: “The biggest change in the College’s capital budget, she said, will come from the proposed expansion to the Thayer School of Engineering.” See the sample master plans of Koetter Kim (post) and Beyer Blinder Belle (post) and the Thayer press release on President Hanlon’s 2013 expansion announcement.

    • The news that a family had donated $100m to support Hanlon initiatives makes one think of the Harkness gifts to create “residential colleges” at Harvard and later Yale, but reading The Dartmouth, one learns:

      Mastanduno said this gift represents a significant departure from past donations, which have tended to focus on capital infrastructure.

      “This isn’t about bricks and mortar,” he said. “It’s about the core academic mission of Dartmouth.”

    —–
    [Update 04.17.2014: Broken link to Mullin removed, Kendal spelling corrected.]

    Dartmouth’s “Westway,” an alternative to Larson’s Cemetery Bridge

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    1. The cemetery is an obstacle to cross-campus foot traffic and contributes to the perception that the business and engineering schools, not to mention the River Cluster dormitories, are distant and isolated.

      To get from the Green to the River Cluster, one has to walk north to Tuck Mall and then west, following the red line on the map below. West Wheelock Street looks a little shorter on a map, but most people do not walk that way because the elevation changes so much. The traffic along West Wheelock also makes the walk not particularly pleasant.

      Meacham map of proposed Westway

    2. During the late 1920s, college architect Jens Larson proposed to solve this problem by building a bridge for pedestrians right over the cemetery (indicated on his 1928 master plan). The blue line above shows the approximate route. The cemetery contains several ravines, so this bridge would have flown through the treetops. It might have been like the Sky Walk in Monteverde Preserve in Costa Rica, a bridge system that has been in magazine ads lately.

      Meacham image of Monte Verde bridge

      Larson’s bridge was never built. It would have been an expensive way to provide mere convenience and seems unlikely to have been received well by the cemetery authorities.

    3. But what about skirting the cemetery’s southern boundary with a bridge or causeway built on private land acquired by the college? The green line on the map above shows this route.

      Meacham image of Westway viaduct

      In the image above, based on a Bing aerial, the roofs of Thayer Dining Hall/53 Commons are visible in the foreground. A Bing view of the site from the west shows how the viaduct would create a circulation network; see also a view of the site from the south.

      A Street View partway up Thayer Drive, the road that leads through the trees from Wheelock Street to Thayer School, shows just some of the elevation change that one would avoid by using the viaduct. See also a view from the east.

    4. A viaduct here could take the form of a Larson-style brick arcade, like the one that connects Streeter to each of its neighbors in the Gold Coast, or the front facade of Memorial Field’s grandstand. This would be expensive. A stone arcade would be even more expensive. The viaduct could be a timber-framed College-Grant style suspension bridge, interesting but perhaps ephemeral. An enclosed airport terminal bridge like at Thayer (Street View) would be expensive and unnecessary. The most interesting form might be that of a very “engineered” steel bridge that recalls the Ski Jump tower. The cheapest and sturdiest form might be a basic utilitarian concrete bridge like that of the rear of the Fairchild Center (Street View) or the side of the Boss Tennis Center.

    5. Those apartments along Wheelock Street are not apparently owned by the college, but they should be, and one guesses that eventually they will be.

      This area probably should be left in apartments no matter who owns the land. Dartmouth could do a South Block project here, selectively improving or replacing buildings and potentially integrating the buildings with the viaduct. The spaces under the walkway could be inhabited or at least occupied, as in Viaduc des Arts in Paris.

    6. By making the buildings rather tall and connecting their upper levels to the bridge, the college could even produce something like the 19-arch South Bridge in Edinburgh of 1788 (Wikipedia, historic-uk.com). A person standing on top of that high-level street in Edinburgh faces what appears to be the ground level of a modest building; in fact, he is at the fourth or fifth floor, with the lowest level of the building resting on the bottom of a valley (Bing aerial).

      In Hanover, some of the buildings on the Wheelock Street side of the bridge would be five or six stories high — towers, really:

    Meacham image of towers along Westway viaduct

    —–

    [Update 12.23.2013: Larson’s 1928 plan from the Previous Master Plans portion of the school’s Master Plan website shows the proposed cemetery bridge as a masonry structure. The suggestion that it was to be a suspension bridge has been removed.]

    [Update 11.03.2013: The town is having Plan NH run a West Wheelock Street design charrette next weekend:

    The Hanover Affordable Housing Commission and Hanover Planning Board recognize underutilized residential land area close to the downtown, a prominent gateway to our Main Street commercial district and the Dartmouth College campus, challenging topography, and the need to accommodate high traffic volumes with pedestrian safety.

    (Via the Planner’s Blog.)]

    Dartmouth’s first “identity standards”?

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    Thayer School now has an official logo guide, complete with examples of unacceptable variations of the logo.

    The guide seems fairly down-to-earth, unlike some of the highly technical standards found elsewhere. Dartmouth itself does not seem to have taken this step yet.

    —–
    [Update 12.14.2013: The Geisel School seems to have been first: its guidelines (pdf), much more rigorous, were published in April of 2012. See this post.]

    Parking will be big

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    Parking has been a problem for years, and the goal of adding parking spaces to the campus is one of the aims of the 2002 master plan. This goal seems to have been satisfied less than most of the others.

    The plan to expand the DHMC Lot near Jesse’s was put on hold and presumably will start up again. A much bigger project is the Cummings Garage (“A major parking garage at Cummings”) to replace the Thayer School parking lot by the cemetery (2002 Master Plan pdf). The garage was proposed to hold 833 cars, for a gain of 602 spots. While it would be extremely convenient to the professional schools, the garage would prevent Thayer School from placing an academic building on that site or from creating a solid connection to any future buildings on the slope down to West Wheelock Street.

    A snippet of a 2004-era Thayer School master plan

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    The Koetter | Kim & Associates website includes an intriguing sketch, of which this is an excerpt:


    Thayer School master plan by Koetter Kim ca. 2004

    Ca. 2004 Thayer School master plan by Koetter Kim

    Note the expansion of Thayer School all the way down Thayer Drive to West Wheelock Street, giving a “public” face to engineering (or business, for that matter) for the first time. Bold! Although the scale of the buildings in the image might not be the most appropriate, this would be a better use of the vacant land than what exists.

    Source: Koetter | Kim & Associates > Projects > Projects List > MacLean Engineering Sciences Center > fourth image.

    Baker and Berry

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    I. King Arthur Café.

    Several weeks ago, this post was set to mention Norwich’s King Arthur Flour with a link to this Google blog post about the company. Since then, Google’s promotion of the article has become controversial. Let’s hope this ends up boosting business for King Arthur, which runs the café located off the catalogue room in Baker Library (King Arthur blog, The Dartmouth, Dartbeat).

    II. Potential Baker alterations.

    The Dartmouth reports that the Undergraduate Deans Office moved out of Parkhurst and into the library over the summer. The new offices appear to be temporary, with a large suite in Baker or elsewhere in the works:

    These changes follow announcements made by College President Jim Yong Kim in May 2010 that the College would implement a new student advising structure beginning Fall 2011. The revamped advising structure would be modeled after a hospital triage system centralizing all relevant offices in one location where students could have their advising needs diagnosed, he said.

    The deans are in Baker temporarily and will announce a new location in the spring (The Dartmouth).

    III. The weathervane and the reference desk.

    Ask Dartmouth has a post on Baker Tower’s weather vane. The big Berry reference desk recently was replaced with a new one of a different design (The Dartmouth).

    IV. Comparing Baker and Berry.

    VSBA designed major additions to two Larson buildings at Dartmouth. The first was the Thayer School addition, which was fairly popular and well-regarded when it opened. The Trustees praised it, probably thinking of the front part:



    Thayer School addition, front (eastern) portion (Google Street View).

    But the Thayer School addition also had a large rear component, a basic laboratory loft:



    Thayer School addition, rear (western) portion (Google Street View).

    The firm’s second major project was the Berry Library and Carson Hall addition to the Baker Library complex. Expected to carry over the classical pavilion from the front of the Thayer project, the firm instead replicated the loft from the rear:



    Berry Library, front (north) facade (Google Street View).

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    [Update 11.17.2012: Broken links to VSBA and Dartbeat fixed.]

    Brand identity topics

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    I. The Dartmouth Company

    Curiously, there is a Boston-based real estate company called The Dartmouth Company. It makes good use of serifs and a dark green color on its website and seems to operate in New Hampshire. See also the more obvious reference to the college at the Dartmouth Education Foundation.

    II. The Arms of Dartmouth’s Schools

    The Dartmouth College website seems to be doing something new when it describes the institution as a collection of five apparently equal schools:

    shields from webpage

    Excerpt from college website.

    The harmonization and use of the schools’ shields is commendable.

    But this arrangement seems to contradict the rule that Dartmouth is the college. The “Associated Schools” — Tuck, Thayer, Medical, and lately the graduate programs — are associated with the college but are not coequals beneath a central university administration. Because “Dartmouth” is the undergraduate college, there is no need to put the letters “CA&S” before one’s class year, for example.

    Tom Owen writes in The Dartmouth today:

    In the discussion following Kim’s address, Provost Carol Folt said there is a “complicated set of reasons” for the gap between Dartmouth’s national and international rankings. Two of the major contributing factors are Dartmouth’s lack of a “university” title and Dartmouth’s focus on undergraduates, both of which have hurt Dartmouth’s international reputation.

    […]

    Although large-scale changes may be necessary in the next decade, alumni must see new developments as part of an institutional history of adaptation rather than as a threat to tradition, Kim said.

    The school’s Quartomillennium celebration in 2019 would be a good time to launch something new.

    [01.25.2012 update: Education Foundation link added.]