Gwathmey-Siegel has some very nice photographs of Berry Sports Center.
Berry Sports Center images
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Category Archives: Alumni Gym
Photo updates for construction projects
The OPDC has posted photos of the progress on the new Varsity House (one of the photos shows Memorial Field in the context of the campus), the Montgomery House renovation (check the pondside facade), and the Soccer Field (with the turf in place and grandstand going in).
Most notable are the photos of the landscaping between Berry and Maynard Street, or Berry Row. See the substantial walkway that organizes the whole project, for example.
Rolfe Field next for rebuilding
Dartmouth Life has an update on new athletic facilities and notes the upcoming renovation of Red Rolfe Field. Artificial turf will replace the grass, the dugouts will be rehabilitated, and a new scoreboard will replace the old.
Gym renovation progress: fitness center opens
The fitness center in the “gymnasium” at the top of Alumni Gym has opened (press release). Photos show a room far busier than when it was a forgotten space on campus.
Varsity House progress
Bruce Wood reports at Green Alert on town zoning approval for the Varsity House, noting the speed of the project and the fact that it will dismantle and reassemble the upper rows of the existing bleachers rather than demolish the whole structure — which seems very frugal.
The plans indicate that the football locker rooms will be located in the building, alongside the east side of the field. This probably means that both teams now will emerge from the visitors’ stands before each half.
Upper gym becoming fitness center
The Office of Planning, Design & Construction has posted several photos of February work on the drill hall or upper gym of Alumni Gymnasium.
Compare this early-twentieth century view:
 
Varsity House under construction
Construction on the new Varsity House started February 22, and detailed information on the latest addition to Dartmouth’s 113-year-old athletic park appeared on line last week.
The building has a project page that includes several November 2005 renderings that now depict the building in red brick, like the Gym, rather than in the green panels implied by the last rendering released.
This early design dated June 10, 2005 will not be built.
The Park Street facade, which will become the right field wall for Red Rolfe Field, is visible for the first time, and the site plan appears to indicate that Rolfe gets a new foul pole.
The third level plan indicates that it will contain mostly offices, with the prime spots overlooking the field held by a meeting room, a conference room, and a sort of lounge — a big room with comfortable chairs, not the row of skyboxes one might have expected.
Contrary to previous speculation here, the existing east stands will not be demolished, only partially disassembled and reinstalled to the south, in front of Leverone.
Alumni Gym’s new fitness center revealed
A rendering of the new fitness center in the renovated drill hall of Alumni Gymnasium seems to show an elevator blocking much of the thermal window at that end of the building; perhaps there was no choice of where to put it, and on-center was better than off-center…
[03.18.2006 “Fitness center” substituted for “mezzanine” to clarify.]
Alumni Gym roof trusses exposed
The Alumni Gym construction updates page has two construction photos. One photo shows the Michael Pool with the airy and astonishing arched steel roof trusses now exposed. It is difficult to believe that they were covered once.
Varsity House goes ahead, Biology delayed
Centerbrook’s new Varsity House has been approved by the Trustees, but the Biology Department’s building is still in planning (The Dartmouth | press release).
The Gym’s stair
The Athletics website has an update on the Gym renovation. One of the photographs shows the upper drill hall, which the project will return to the industrial space it really is.
One of the first things the College did when it took over the Gym from the alumni was to add a central north stair to the eastern and western runs that already led to the main entrance. Now the school is replacing that narrow central run with a single broad main stair and substituting bicycle racks for the eastern run and a ramp for the western (see plan [pdf]). One expects that the ramp nevertheless will see the greatest use, since most people arrive from the west. The chunky cornerstone, laid by President Ernest Fox Nichols at his inauguration on October 14, 1909, may be obscured by the ramp.
Varied notes
Small updates:
- Fred Wilson‘s new reinterpretation of the Hood’s collection opened on October 1.
- The College has long considered serving beer in the future north campus dining hall.
- The Dartmouth notes that work on the Gym continues and should end by April.
- The Dartmouth notes that Chi Gamma Epsilon and Bones Gate have reopened after their
building code renovations and additions. - Dartmouth Life has a roundup of current construction projects. The links at the bottom are
to unique articles rather than the Facilities Planning Projects Page. - The academic projects of Visual Arts Building architects Machado and Silvetti includes chiefly Princeton’s Scully Hall (1998) (more) and — more remarkably — a 1992 parking garage there.
Varsity House renderings
Section [pdf] and west elevation [pdf] drawings of the Varsity House proposed by Centerbrook (June 10, 2005) are on line.
The three-level building is inspired more by the grandstand’s 1950s press box than the brick west façade of Memorial Field; the return to Modernism takes the building closer in form and finish to Berry Gym than to Davis Field House.  The building’s green metal (?) panels will make it the first substantial building at Dartmouth that is green in color.  The focal point of the building’s long field facade is a row of windows marked by a raised parapet with the name DARTMOUTH on it, a response to the press box.
The new east stand in front of the building will be less than half as deep as the current east stand, though it will be longer and obscure part of the facade of Leverone. Â The new building and stand together will be shallower than the current stand, effectively enlarging Red Rolfe Field.
Squash Courts Building renovation
The Squash Courts Building is being renovated to contain multipurpose spaces. The College is switching from the North American court to the larger international court, and renovated some of the courts in Berry Gym for that purpose during 2002. One imagines that the building would not have been so easy to change:
Proposed Leverone addition
Tully International, which renovated Leverone Field House, also designed a two-hundred-foot long addition to the field house, presumably to extend it westward in the direction of the football field. The school’s subsequent decision to build a new varsity house behind the east stands may have put this plan on hold.
Historic benches from Spaulding Pool
Benches from the Spaulding Pool addition to Alumni Gymnasium (Charles Alonzo Rich, 1919-1921) have made their way to the office corridors of the gym:
Leverone renovations
The Leverone Field House designed by Pier Luigi Nervi was renovated recently:
Infinity scaffold
One of the more interesting sculptural installations in Hanover is the infinity scaffolding in the cavernous Karl Michael Pool in Alumni Gymnasium:
