Tag Archives: preservation

Heating plant preliminaries under way

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The future heating plant has a project page, and the college has issued a request for qualifications (pdf). The college is talking to the town about a site (Union Leader). The project includes the decommissioning of the historic heating plant but does not address the possible demolition of that building; nevertheless, an article in the Valley News includes this somewhat sickening point:

Hanover officials, who have set sustainable energy goals as well, seemed to embrace the concept. Planning Board Chair Judith Esmay said the eventual tearing down of the 175-foot brick smokestack at the oil-burning plant could turn into a “community event.”

The revived campus master plan project “will envision replacement of the existing power plant — located at the campus core — that will be replaced by an offsite biomass energy plant.”

Hood Museum opens

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The renovated and expanded museum opened last month, and the initial notices are in: articles by Eleanor Gibson in Dezeen, Suzanne Stephens in Architectural Record, and Sydney Franklin in Archpaper.

(The Dezeen notice mentions the preservation of the gray-brick exterior of the stair as an interior wall of the new atrium. In fact the original stair exterior was a neat and characteristic row of flat concrete pillars — see this image from See Local Art. The renovation actually obscures the fact that the wall was once an exterior surface. Presumably the change in the height of the wall required the new surface.)

The Hood has a Visit page and, from last November, a video with Director Stomberg. The Sestercentennial site has an announcement with photos of the original museum from 1985. The Hood’s Quarterly (pdf) has an article about previous locations of the college’s art collection.

Various topics

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  • Dr. Seuss’s widow Audrey Geisel died in December. The college posted a remembrance.
  • The expanded and renovated Hood Museum opens this month (New Hampshire Magazine, Boston Globe). There are almost no exterior photos available at this point.
  • The college has begun the large Thayer School/CS addition (Valley News). The project page has a couple of new images.
  • The Rauner Blog has a post on bookplates.
  • The BBB campus master plan was completed in 2013, which is not a long time ago in master-planning terms. Yet last fall, the college put out a request for proposals from firms offering to update that master plan (Dartmouth News).
  • The Big Green Alert Blog has links to nice photos of Memorial Field and the Sphinx plaque inside. That plaque continues to tease with its ambiguity: Is it saying that Sphinx members of the various listed classes donated the money, or that some Sphinx members donated money and that the listed Dartmouth classes also donated money? And of course there is the misquotation (not even adequate as a paraphrase) of Hovey’s line “And the hill winds know their names.” This might be the first plaque at Dartmouth to use the singular “they.”
  • The Crosby Street dorm site plan is up, along with the two views shown during the selection process (project page). Sasaki will run with the “question mark” footprint proposal.
  • The Dartmouth Bookstore is going away (Valley News, The Dartmouth). Sad and perhaps inevitable, and quite a contrast to the sense of vibrancy found in the Bookstore during the early 1990s.
  • The Dartmouth reports that Chabad has opened the house it purchased and renovated at 19 Allen Street.
  • Larson Square (see post) might be happening! In its story on the new dorm site, The Dartmouth states that “at the Lebanon Street end of Crosby Street, there is a multi-headed intersection of Sanborn, Crosby and on the other side of the church front yard, Hovey, which the town has long wanted to improve.” Julia Griffin “said that this project may provide the town an opportunity to do that, which could be a ‘silver lining’ in terms of what the town requires regarding the intersection improvements and traffic flow through this area.”
    One can almost imagine the traffic circle with the obelisk in the center; or perhaps a grassy peninsula displaying the French field piece that was donated to the college as a memorial following the First World War.
  • The seal-like logos that OCD designed for Dartmouth’s Houses are nice, but each of those is only one expression of what should an heraldic symbol that represents the particular House. (And why aren’t they on line?). Sewanee now has an heraldic flag for each of its 19 dorms (Sewanee, “Rallying ’Round the Flags,” Mary Pryor, “Heraldry Brings Sewanee a Sense of “Community” for Residence Halls,” The Sewanee Purple). Examples of the flags hang in a dining hall.
    The flags are beautiful and informative. (Not sure about the marks of cadency as indicating the construction sequence of the dorms, though: doesn’t the star, for example, imply that there are two older dorms using the same coat of arms? It reminds one of the Stennis Flag — is it really important that Mississippi is the 20th state? Maybe it is.)
    Dartmouth’s House banners (each a field of a particular color with the House’s name) hang in Food Court, as is appropriate. Some day, maybe once the Houses are individually endowed and permanently renamed, the Houses at Dartmouth can have coats of arms.
  • A story on an RPI fraternity that moved into a former rectory (and acquired the Catholic church connected to it) is linked from a story in The Atlantic on the reuse of old church buildings.
  • A map showing every building in the U.S.
  • Apologies for the long period of silence here, including a website outage (forgot to renew the domain registration…).

Dartmouth should save the smokestack, if not the entire Heat Plant

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The college is requesting proposals from private companies to build a new campus power plant away from the center of town. The Valley News reports:

The plans will mean an end for Dartmouth’s power plant east of the Hood Museum of Art in downtown Hanover, including its 175-foot brick smokestack on the 1-acre site. The property, in use since the late 1890s, would be decommissioned and “repurposed” for other uses, Dartmouth said.

See also the college announcement.

It would be pretty short-sighted of the college to demolish the historic heating plant. It’s a fine old building that shows the hand of each of the college’s two main 20th-century architects, Charles Rich and Jens Larson. It encloses a vast open volume, making it useful as an art studio or a gallery space — at the center of the Arts District. One supposes that preserving as little as the smokestack would be too much to ask at this point, but that stack is a fundamental Hanover landmark (a prior post on this topic). Fifty years ago, the label of “old industrial building” might have been enough to justify demolition, but people are more sophisticated today.