Category Archives: Tuck School

About the Tuck School of Business Administration.

A master plan mystery

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The BBB/MVVA master plan has not been presented to the public, but one small illustration from it has been published on the Web. Reading much into this one image is difficult. The image emphasizes a system of green circulation armatures; although it depicts several new buildings, it does not distinguish them from existing buildings.

Nevertheless some fairly significant proposals for new construction can be discerned. One of the most intriguing involves Tuck Drive, which curves gently uphill from the left:

Detail from Beyer Blinder Belle master plan for Dartmouth

Tuck Drive is simply cut off in the image; it dead-ends behind Buchanan instead of emerging from Webster’s Vale to join with Tuck Mall. (Here is a recent Bing aerial of the site.) Perhaps the blocking of Tuck Drive would not be much of a change. The upper end was already bollarded by 2010, a change presumably made when Fahey and McLane were built.

Where does the master plan have this Tuck Mall driveway leading, then? It goes to a parking lot. The broad, curving sidewalk and new lawn behind Buchanan appear to be level, bridging over the Vale.

Whether it is a small surface lot or an underground garage, this would not be an all-school parking area; it would serve the Tuck School. Indeed the green bridge with its broad path appear to link Buchanan to the current President’s House and the two or three new buildings shown nearby. It looks as if the designers are reviving the idea that the President’s House, whose address is technically 1 Tuck Drive, be made a part of the Tuck School. If an appropriate replacement for the executive mansion could be found, it would make a lot of sense.

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[Update 04.16.2015: Typo in post title corrected.]

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.]

Heraldry: The Tuck School and the Temple at Hephaestos

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I. The Geisel School. The big topic in Dartmouth heraldry is the Geisel School of Medicine’s new shield, mentioned here. It contains the familiar elements of the river, pine, founding date, and book, and it omits the depiction of the old Medical Building, which was demolished about 55 years ago. It deserves an analysis of its own.

II. The Graduate Studies Program. The Grad Studies shield seems to be receiving a big push, with a banner for Dartmouth Night (Grad Studies’ Flickr photostream) and the distribution of decals to students (Flickr).

The shield carries on what seem to be the unifying elements in Dartmouth’s armorial family: (1) the use of a founding date and (2) the placement of wavy lines in the base of the shield to represent the Connecticut River.

Here is how it looks in the group (published in March, shortly before the medical shield was replaced):

Shields image from Vox the Vote
Shields representing Dartmouth and Associated Schools, from Vox the Vote.

The vertical year on the Grad Studies shield does not seem entirely successful in this rendition.

III. The Tuck School.

Graphically, the chunkiness of the Tuck shield, at the far right above, is appealing. It uses an extreme closeup view to cut off the building’s eaves, and its heavy line causes the shield border itself to read as part of the temple front. The Eighteenth-century letterforms are also nice and relate to Dartmouth’s seal, although they are not of the same 1990s (?) language as the rest of the Tuck shield.

The one thing that has always been disturbing about the Tuck shield is that it depicts a nonexistent building. It is not a stylized version of Tuck Hall’s portico; instead it represents a hexastyle Doric temple, like the temple at Hephaestos.


Temple at Hephaestos, from Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (1905) via Google Books.

Compare the row of six squat columns without capitals in Hephaestos to the Ionic portico of four relatively attenuated columns in Tuck Hall:

Tuck Hall by Meacham

Tuck Hall temple front.


Shield with border removed and eaves extended, treating border as representing outer columns.


Alternatively, shield with border removed entirely to leave a quadristyle portico.

Perhaps this should not be irksome, since Dartmouth’s own shield depicts a nonexistent building as well. One way to resolve the problem would be for the Tuck School to build a hexastyle temple front somewhere on its campus.

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[Update 08.16.2012: Green temple-only illustrations added.]

Dartmouth sells its CRREL land to the Army after 50 years of subsidies

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The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory on Lyme Road is not only the state’s largest industrial facility, it also represents the U.S. Army’s only presence in New Hampshire.

For the last half-century, Dartmouth has owned most of the land underlying the laboratory, and the Corps of Engineers has paid essentially nothing to use it. Now that the original $1 lease signed in 1962 has ended (The Dartmouth), the college has decided to sell the property to the Corps for $18.6m (Valley News).




A Google Maps view of the CRREL property, with the golf course at lower left and Dartmouth’s once-and-future Rivercrest housing development at top.

Finances aside, the loss of control over this property creates a danger that some unappealing future development could move in if CRREL were to leave: one presumes that Dartmouth has retained a right of first refusal for any future sale. At least this sale removes a potential site on which the Tuck School could (obviously unwisely) build a new campus.

More links of interest

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  • A nice reproduction of the famous photo of the burning of Dartmouth Hall is on line. This view to the southwest shows the rear of Dartmouth Hall, not the front. The photo seems to have been taken a moment after a large explosion — a smoke column is blasted horizontally from the northeast corner of the building at the second-floor level. Many of the students nearby are sprinting away, and some are turning to look back at the building.

  • The Band is getting rid of its old style of uniform, a green wool blazer over a white turtleneck, white pants, and white tennis shoes. That combination seems to have lasted about 45 years.

  • In August, the Planning Board talked in hypothetical terms of several potential development projects on Lyme Road, such as a tennis club north of the Chieftain (pdf), a golf course and country club around the junction of Lyme Road and Old Lyme Road (pdf), and others (pdf).

  • The official traditions page is irritating not just because of the punctuation, the capitalization of “the HOP,” or the use of sentences like “It’s far different than [sic] you’re imagining.” Nor is it because of the claim that Homecoming was established in 1884, when Dartmouth Night didn’t even exist with or without a bonfire until 1895. No, it’s the statement that the school’s chartered mission is “… education of Indian youth … and also to educate English and others.” The Charter contains the true mission, which is “the education & instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes … and also of English Youth and any others.”

  • An early-1960s photo of the Hop excavation looking southwest from around Wilson Hall.

  • Ask Dartmouth has put up some interesting posts lately, covering the Lone Pine, with a super photo of College Hill probably taken from the steeple of the College Church; the Hinman Mail Center (what it doesn’t say is that the student mailboxes are called Hinman Boxes, and until the mid-1990s the USPS tolerated the use of HB numbers in mailing addresses); the pendulum in Fairchild; and Sanborn Tea, still 10 cents a cup.

  • Rauner Library’s blog has too many interesting posts to keep up with. See, for example, the post on the color Dartmouth Green.

  • The Hanover Improvement Society has a smaller membership and larger ambition than one might expect.

  • The New Hampshire Good Roads Association of 1904 is a remarkable survivor from the pre-auto era, when bicyclists were the interest group demanding that the highways be smooth.

  • The bus stop study (pdf) recommends the removal of the curb cuts at Hanover Park (Google Street View). Bravo. That building would be so much more inviting if it did not pretend to have its own driveway.

  • Dartmouth and the Mac: The Valley News article about Apple products in Hanover doesn’t focus on Dartmouth’s long-time maintenance of a Mac-centric campus. The college turned its Mac expectation into a requirement for all entering students in 1991. That seems fairly early until one reads about Drexel selecting Apple in 1983 and requiring Macs as soon as they appeared in 1984 (Drexel’s Steve Jobs memorial events).

  • The unpaved paths on Whittemore Green should be applauded (Street View).

  • The lively Congregational Church building in Wilder (Olcott), Vermont was designed in 1889 by Edward Goss. Following a renovation, it has become the Charles T. Wilder Center (U.K. Architects, Trumbull-Nelson, Lyme Properties). Charles Wilder was a mill owner who also gave buildings to Wellesley and Dartmouth.

  • The Center for Cartoon Studies in WRJ is moving into a new headquarters (Valley News). The Center’s students occasionally create or display works at Dartmouth.

  • National Geographic Traveler ranks the Dartmouth Winter Carnival sixth among world carnivals. That is pretty good, considering. The number one carnival is Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous. (My high school band was scheduled to play the Rondy parade but pulled out when cold weather was forecast. Why not just wear warm clothing? Because this was the one time in three years when we could wear our official uniforms. Why not just play out the windows of a bus? Because the last time the band had tried that, spectators had pelted the bus with snowballs all the way down Fourth Avenue: if they were going to stand around and watch a parade when it was 20 below, the least the band could do was actually march.)

  • Women’s Hockey won at Fenway (!) recently (Valley News). Fenway’s paint color was described as “Dartmouth Green” in 1934, and that color seems to have been used when the Green Monster was first painted in 1947. The shade used on the Green Monster does seem to have been lightened since.

  • Dartmouth Now has a piece on “cabinhopping.”

  • New notice of old projects: Centerbrook’s Wilder Lab addition; Lavallee/Brensinger’s Red Rolfe Field and DHMC Patient Training & Safety Center remodeling, and Red Rolfe Field; and Truex Cullins’s Buchanan Hall alterations.

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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken links to Buchanan and Red Rolfe pages replaced.]
[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Drexel replaced.]

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.]

Buildings – construction, some demolition

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Rauner Library has provided a remarkable photo of the Butterfield Museum embraced in a death-hug by Baker Library. This is a view of the south and east facades of the east wing of Baker, looking to the northwest. The problem of Butterfield appears to have had a significant influence on the design of Baker.

See also the photos of the bells and the steel frame of the tower under construction.

With historic Clement Hall demolished (film and photos), the Visual Arts Center construction has been put out for bid.

Phi Delt reconstruction continues, The Dartmouth reports.

Engleberth Construction provides photos of the Tuck Living-Learning Center (Achtmeyer, Raether, and Pineau-Valencienne Halls).

It is not new, but Forever New: A 10-Year Report provides a comprehensive photo of the interior-block facades of Kemeny-Haldeman not available elsewhere.

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).

Buchanan’s hotel-like renovation is over

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The Tuck School’s Whittemore Hall, which houses executives in the summer, has been compared to a hotel, but it acts as a dormitory most of the time. Buchanan Hall after the Truex Cullins renovation really does seem to be essentially a year-round hotel for executive education students. There is even a front desk. The firm has taken the building’s original (semi-budget?) modernism and polished it.

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

Varied topics

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The Valley News has a story on an 1840s organ that ended up in a Wilder church (1890) and is now being restored. Wilder’s Congregational church (presuming that is the building) originally had very close ties to Dartmouth and Charles Wilder, donor of the funds for Wilder Hall.

The President’s House renovation is being “paid for by donors who want to take the cost — for which the college has received some criticism — out of the budget, and off the list of items raised whenever spending cuts are mentioned” according to the Valley News. The Dartmouth also has the story.

The Dartmouth noted that the frame of the Life Sciences building was topped out in mid-December.

The early-2000s “decompression” of dormitory rooms has begun to seem a bit luxurious. The college might increase income by expanding the entering class by about 50 students (The Dartmouth), a move that might require turning some doubles back into triples and so on.

Tuck Today has two glossy features related to its new buildings: Jeff Moag, “Dedicated to the Future,” and Christopher Percy Collier, “What Lies Beneath.” The architects (Goody Clancy) have photos of the buildings.

Collier’s article “It Takes a Village” in Tuck Today is about Sachem Village, the grad/professional student housing site in Lebanon. It mentions the predecessor of Wigwam Circle, the postwar temporary housing group behind Thayer School. It is also worth noting that Dartmouth built another group of similar portable buildings for married students next to the high school, called Sachem Village.

Daniel Stewart Fraser of Dan & Whit’s in Norwich (“If we don’t have it, you don’t need it”) has died at 96. The Valley News has a story.

Bevy King in West Leb is expanding (Valley News).

Smaller campus additions ending, beginning

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The Dartmouth reported that the New Hampshire Hall project is ending.

The Buchanan renovation is going ahead. For a short time, the project page seems to have included a rendering of the glassed-in hyphen that will connect Buchanan to Woodbury House.

In town, the Valley News notes that the foundering hotel proposed for the corner below the Post Office might be taken up by a new developer.

Tuck LLC buildings named

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More photos of the Tuck Living and Learning Complex are available. The flanking elements of the three-building complex will be named, from west to east, Achtmeyer Hall and Pineau-Valencienne Hall. The connector portion, with its dining and lecture halls, will be named Raether Hall. (The front facade image available for some time now indicated the names of Achtmeyer, Raether, and “Donor.”)

Buchanan Hall changes once again

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Buchanan Hall, the shy Modernist Tuck School building on Tuck Mall, will be renovated by Fleck & Lewis Architects, the OPDC has announced. The building started as a student dormitory but now will be converted into a center for Executive Education. The upper levels of the four-level building will contain housing, while faculty and administrative offices and lounges for executives will occupy the ground level.

[02.03.2008 correction: the four- (not three-) level building was not converted to offices with the completion of Whittemore.]

Tuck LLC donors hinted at

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The Tuck School is building a Living and Learning Complex west of Whittemore Hall. The H-shaped building comprises eastern and western residential wings joined by a full-height connector.

A front elevation that has been available for some time indicates that the western wing will be named Achtmeyer and the connector will be named Raether. In the image, the eastern wing is still named “Donor.”

Possible namesakes: William F. Achtmeyer is the Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Tuck School and created the William F. Achtmeyer Center for Global Leadership in 2000. Paul E. Raether is a member of the Board of Overseers and has given the Paul Raether Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Board fixed.]

“Whittemore Green” as a name

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As the irregular grassy plot in front of the River Cluster becomes better defined and and is transformed into a front door to the Tuck School (through the school’s Whittemore Hall), the space needs a name.

Landscape architects Saucier & Flynn have mentioned “Whittemore Green” in town planning meetings (pdf).

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to 11 July 2006 minutes removed.]