The relatively-recent brick building with the giant gable on South Street (Street View) has been demolished, and construction on the hotel Six South Street has begun (Facebook page with January 30 photo to west).

A big exterior rendering is available on the Maine Course CEO’s blog, and interior renderings are on Facebook and the main site as well.

Speaking of graphic design, the new hotel on South Street (behind Hanover Park, where Panda House used to be) has been named Six South Street and has been given a logo by Vreeland Marketing & Design.

Detail of logo

While the hotel is to be welcomed and its builders admired for their boldness and attention to urban design, the logo deserves some criticism:

The word “Street” really should be written out. While “South St.” might be part of an address, the thoroughfare that gives its name to the hotel is “South Street.” The word “Six” seems to have been spelled out to add formality or pretense, the way it is in “The Wall Street Inn” (not the plain-old “Wall St. Inn”). So the word “Street” should be as well. Only an address plaque on the building should read “6 South St.” After all, both “Six” and “South” have shorter versions that could have been used but weren’t. And even though “Hotel” is on its own line, it still makes the logo seem to refer to a “Saint Hotel” (“St. Hotel”).

When a word is abbreviated, it requires a period. Probably to prevent the letters “ST” from appearing to retreat from the righthand edge, the logo omits the period. This should have been solved some other way.

This looks interesting: Professor Colin Calloway’s The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).

(Curiously, the Press still uses Scotford’s short-lived 1960s shield rather than the standard MacDonald version of 1944/1957.)

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).

Dartmouth demolished Brewster Hall and will tear down Clement Hall soon. The Dartmouth has a photo of the site after demolition. This is what Brewster used to look like:

Brewster Hall

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

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.

Vermont Today states that the long-discussed hotel on South Street east of the Post Office parking lot is going ahead. Maine Course Hospitality Group is building it:

Detail of Maine Course website showing 6 South.

Construction will require the demolition of a building on the site.

Rauner’s blog describes a fantastic horizontal-scrolling map of the Connecticut River at Hanover (image). It was created by Robert Fletcher around the turn of the twentieth century and was found among some records of the Hanover Water Works Co. that the library received recently. The shallow box containing the map is portable, and the map contains a number of notes on related facts.

This map could be scanned, stitched together, overlaid with a current aerial, and made into a fascinating website. A lot of the landmarks noted by Fletcher have probably been under several feet of water since Wilder Dam raised the river in the 1950s; yet the River was not pristine in Fletcher’s time, and he notes that the low-water level at Ledyard Bridge was raised by six feet by the dam at Olcott Falls (Wilder).

A UNH news story notes that one of the large and notable relief maps of the state created by Dartmouth’s Professor Hitchcock in the late 1870s is being restored. This particular map came to UNH in 1894, so it is probably not the one depicted on the east wall of the Butterfield Museum after that building opened in 1899.

The Dartmouth reports that the freestanding Class of 1953 Commons and the Thayer Dining Hall replacement, projects that have been on hold for about a year and a half, have both been canceled. The funds raised for 53 Commons will fund the renovation of the original Thayer Hall instead.

Dartmouth has frequently wrestled with the question of whether to have a single main dining hall or a widely-scattered group of two or more dining halls. Commons in College Hall was the only dining hall from 1901 to 1937, when Thayer Dining Hall opened. But Thayer was just across the street from Commons, and connected by a tunnel — the centrality remained.

Thayer Dining Hall

About ten years ago, Dartmouth decided to put a new dining hall at the north end of campus as the centerpiece of a group of new dormitories and a polar counterpart to Thayer (see the North Campus Master Plan). Moore Ruble Yudell with Bruner/Cott designed the building, which was to be called the Class of 1953 Dining Commons and can be seen in a series of sketches from the spring of 2007.

Detail of photo of model of 53 Commons, designed by Moore Ruble Yudell with Bruner/Cott, from 1953 Commons Sketches

This building and a temporary dining hall were to relieve pressure from Thayer so that Thayer could be demolished and replaced by a building designed by Kieran Timberlake. Known in the collegiate context for spare stone dormitories and a glass-walled dining hall at Middlebury, Kieran Timberlake considered renovating Thayer in its Basis of Design (November 3, 2006). The firm’s final proposal involved the complete replacement of Thayer with a new building set back from Mass Row.

Detail of planning alternate 1a from Kieran Timberlake Basis of Design

The firm produced preliminary designs (The Dartmouth) before Dartmouth put the project on hold in the spring or summer of 2008.

Some concern over what appeared to be the Thayer Replacement’s poor preservation practice was expressed here. So although one wishes the circumstances were otherwise, it is good to see that Thayer will survive. No mention has been made of who will handle the renovation, but judging from their stylish renovations of Davenport and Pierson Colleges at Yale, Kieran Timberlake could produce a very interesting design.

[Update 01.17.2010: Both the article in the D and the press release note that Thayer will be renamed the Class of 1953 Commons. The release also emphasizes the preservation aspect and notes that work will begin this summer and end in 2011.]

Now that the Spaulding Auditorium loading docks have been reconfigured (see the Google Street View of the construction — Hanover is now available in Street View, by the way), the Visual Arts Center can go ahead as planned. William A. Berry & Son, Inc. is managing the construction. The architects’ project page has not returned yet.

Brewster Hall has been demolished, and Clement Hall will be torn down during the first week in February (The Dartmouth).

A Valley News article reports President Kim’s suggestion that Dartmouth host a national institute of the science of the delivery of health care. One imagines that it would accompany or expand upon the existing Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. That institute is scheduled to occupy the postponed future Koop Medical Science Complex at the south end of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (map).

If not located at the hospital, however, such an institute would make an excellent candidate for placement north of the medical school, even on the golf course. It would not require parking for patients; it would benefit from its proximity to downtown — walkable if not convenient enough for a student function — and yet it would be indisputably part of the college.

To allay the concerns expressed here last year, this building and any other buildings on the site should be made to follow the form of the town, not the campus. A grid of streets with sidewalks and buildings, rather than a network of curving driveways with lawns, would promote density while acknowledging that the college does not expect students to walk this far from the Green on a regular basis. The buildings would harmonize with the campus without pretending to be a part of it — much more South Block than McLaughlin Cluster.

The Institute for Security, Technology, and Society could move to the site, along with other administrative offices now at remote locations, such as the offices in the bank building on Main Street and the Development Office, which is in Centerra.

The perfect completion of such a plan would involve the Hanover Country Club House. The club has wanted a larger and more convenient clubhouse for several years. A new east-west connector street at the north end of this expansion project, crossing the south end of the golf course between Lyme Road to Rope Ferry Road, could provide an excellent site for such a building. The clubhouse would occupy the north side of this street, looking up the stretch of greensward; the south side of the street would be a densely-built wall representing the end of the urban development of Hanover. Compare the fascinating conditions of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

In Hanover, the clubhouse would stand on the north side of the northern cross-street, whichever was built:

Example of town-form development

[Update 02.06.2010: Map added.]

The office building at 4 Currier Place, designed by Truex Cullins (project page) for the Dartmouth Real Estate office (rental page) is nearing completion. Guy C. Denechaud’s article in the Valley Business Journal notes that Dartmouth has not put this much office space on the market in years.

Governor Wentworth signed Dartmouth’s charter — really more like its letters patent — on December 13, 1769. President Kim has made the 250th anniversary of this event in 2019 a sort of goal or endpoint for a ten-year budget process, such as in his October 26 faculty address (Vox), his presentation to the board at its fall meeting (The Dartmouth), and his December 1 financial presentation (pdf).

Although it is early to plan for the actual event, Professor Fischel’s letter to the editor of The Dartmouth suggests a new term: “quartomillennial” instead of “semiquincentennial.”

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).

The college radio station turned 50 in 2008 and has a photographic history on line. One of the photos from the 1990s shows Brett Haber, now the sports director for the CBS station in Washington, D.C. Brett, this is as good a time as any to apologize for throwing out your ski boots while cleaning the attic of Sigma Nu in 1992.

The White River Junction railroad station is for sale. The sale site has photos and plans. The building is an approximate contemporary and formal cousin of Thayer Dining Hall, by the same firm, and can seem like an outpost of the campus for students arriving by rail.

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.