Dartmo.

A graphical article based on research by Barbara Krieger in the July/August Alumni Magazine nicely covers a larger exhibit in the History Room in Baker. It is good to see the site for the amphitheater named as Murdough rather than the Bema, which is the site that that drawing is usually said to describe.

One or two quibbles: the 1931 courtyard Inn on page 53 was meant not not the Robinson Hall area but for the Spaulding Auditorium site, as is shown on the exhibit’s Dartmouth House Plot Plan. The gateway shown in the Larson drawing would have faced east, and Lebanon Street is depicted on the left of the drawing. (The main block of the current Inn was completed in 1967 rather than 1887.)

The focus on the Dartmouth Hall cupola is a bit of a wild goose chase. The plans depicted are by William Gamble and show a masonry building that was never built. Dartmouth Hall was built from some other plans, long since lost, that almost certainly showed a cupola. Those plans might or might not have been by Gamble and probably were not by Peter Harrison. (The cupola that Tucker admired was probably a somewhat different midcentury replacement for the original.)

Here is an image that did not make it into the article, a pre-Leverone proposal for a field house by Eggers & Higgins:

Wow. That is a view to the southeast from above the gym. South Park Street runs behind the field house, and the field in the upper right corner is the site of the later Leverone Field House.

The article quotes Eisenhower on “what a college ought to look like.” Conan O’Brien recently paraphrased this commentary while adding something of his own:

It’s absolutely beautiful here, though. It is the quintessential college cam-… American college campus. It does look like a movie set.

(Video, at 1:27.)

OPDC has photos of Burnham and the Sports Pavilion that occupies the plaza between Burnham and Sculley-Fahey. The Pavilion’s south (field-side) facade, which was not emphasized in the drawings published prior to construction, makes the building look like an early-twentieth century central European lockmaster’s house.

The north end of Burnham Field has a short but impressive stretch of high brick wall to serve as a sign. The decision not to employ the stepped gable motif, which appears in the gym and Spaulding Pool and was repeated in the recent Boss Tennis Center, seems like a missed opportunity to inject some coherence into Dartmouth’s athletic facilities. Floren in particular might have made good use of it; but at least all of these buildings are built of brick, which does a great deal to unify them.

In general construction news, Guy C. Denechaud writes that “Projects Are Plentiful at Dartmouth College,” Valley Business Journal (April 7, 2008).

The Valley News reports that the fieldhouse at Burnham, called the Sports Pavilion, is open as the clubhouse for the soccer and lacrosse teams. The school will add an athletic trainers’ facility to the north side of the building in the future.

Alpha Theta is also working on repairs to comply with the Fuller Audit.

The Dartmouth reports that Bartlett Hall is being rehabilitated.

New Hampshire Hall’s exterior was photographed prior to the expansions that is under way now.

The Team Facility Building or field house between Sculley-Fahey and Burnham Fields is well under way. The project page has photos. A rendering shows how it will look.

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.

The Big Green Alert Blog has posted photos of the construction of Burnham Field south of Thompson Arena.

Landscape architects Saucer + Flynn have posted new information including descriptions of eight projects for Dartmouth as well as landscapes for North Park Street Graduate Student Housing, 7 Lebanon Street, the DHMC, projects in Centerra, and the Sphinx.

The firm also designed a wrought-iron fence for Skull & Bones in New Haven, which is not the kind of landscape project you see every day.

A closer look at Burnham Field shows that it really involves two independent parts:

1. Burnham Field (plan), with a grandstand and earth berms around it for seating (not shown in the pre-design concept).
   The architects, Freeman French Freeman, renovated the 1920s baseball and soccer grandstand at UVM’s Centennial Field.

2. A Fieldhouse (plan; west elevation, with Scully-Fahey grandstand in background; aerial perspective from northwest above the soccer field). The Fieldhouse will present its higher principal facade, toward the Blackman Fields — not toward either nearby grandstand. This facade situates the entrances to the building’s two locker rooms beneath a porch or an awning.

Plans for Burnham Field, the soccer field south of Thompson Arena, are available on the project’s web page. The architects Freeman French Freeman have designed a roofed pavilion (image) to provide Burnham and Scully-Fahey with restrooms and possibly other functions.

The New York Times examines the decline in Ivy football attendance that accompanied the shift from NCAA Division IA to Division IAA.

That decline is one of the reasons why Princeton recently demolished Palmer Stadium (Henry J. Hardenburgh, 1914) and replaced it with the lower-capacity Princeton Stadium (Rafael Viñoly, 1998), and why Dartmouth recently replaced some of Memorial Field’s seating with the Floren Varsity House (Centerbrook, 2006).

(The Times notes that Ivy schools’ teams “were perennial national champions from 1869 to 1939.” That should read “from 1874 to 1939,” since 1874 was the first time college football was ever played in the U.S. (Harvard v. McGill). The game that teams played for several years following 1869 was soccer. The confusion might come from Hickok Sports, which lists pre-1874 soccer games at the head of a line of football champions, or from the Rutgers University football page, which still claims that the 1869 game makes Rutgers the home of college football, although the very same webpage acknowledges that the game was played under rules “adopted from those of the London Football Association,” i.e. soccer. The first game of college football ever played between two U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875.)

In the wake of Britain’s education fees controversy, The Guardian has seized on the similarities between the endowments and enrollments of Dartmouth and Oxford to compare Dartmouth favorably to the English institution.

Dartmouth’s stadium, tiny in Ivy terms, comes out as peculiarly impressive in the article because it has enough seats for everyone…

Somehow it is hard to picture American football as seen from an English football terrace (see an image of Arsenal’s new stadium in the UAE, proof that terraces are not a result of budget constraints; terrace stories; terrace songs and chants).

The author of the Guardian piece might be shocked to learn that “enrollment” in the U.S. means total students, not just the entering class. That means that the comparison is even less valid: Dartmouth is less than one-quarter the size of Oxford’s 17,000 “enrollment.” There are dormitory clusters at Dartmouth that are larger than Oxford colleges.

[Update 12.12.2006: Enrollment information added.]

A somewhat disjointed article on Dartmouth’s local pre-soccer form of soccer, Old Division Football, has been posted.

The only information of any interest outside Dartmouth might be the conclusions, obvious enough but still not widely known, that:

1. The first soccer game in the world between two universities seems to have been the Princeton-Rutgers game of 1869. Oxford and Cambridge did not play until 1872. (The Football Association wrote the rules of “soccer” in 1863, and Rutgers was using those rules, possibly with slight variations.) The story that Princeton and Rutgers played the first American gridiron football game before rugby had arrived is so obviously incorrect that it is hard to imagine why it is still told, yet it is the official line at Rutgers. Back then, soccer was called “football” and allowed the use of the hands, just not running with the ball.

2. The first college football game in the U.S. was the McGill-Harvard rugby game of 1874. College football and pro football as we know them today are descendants of the rugby that McGill played. The first college football game between U.S. teams was the Harvard-Yale game of 1875. Princeton, Rutgers, and the other schools that had been playing soccer dropped it and switched to rugby. All American football is played under the rules of rugby as used by Harvard and Yale and modified by them and their later competitors during the succeeding decades.

Errata for the first page of the enjoyable Dartmouth College Football: Green Fields of Autumn by David Shribman and Jack DeGange (page 10):

1. “Old Division,” later known as “Whole Division,” was Dartmouth’s distinctive football game in the mid-19th century.
   Should read:
   “Old Division,” later known as “Whole Division,” was Dartmouth’s distinctive soccer-style game by the mid-19th century.

2. The “field,” originally the entire campus, was later narrowed to “the college yard,” now the Green.
   Should read:
   The field was the Green.

3. The buildings in the background of this photograph (including the Church of Christ) that had not already been moved or replaced were relocated from the north end of the Green when Baker Library was built in the 1920s
   Should read:
   The houses in the background of this photograph were relocated from the north end of the Green before Baker Library was built in the 1920s, and the Church of Christ burned down in 1931.

The first and last notes are merely pickiness regarding imprecisions (though the implication that Old Division was related to American Football would be inaccurate). The second note deserves some clarification. The College Yard was and is east of the Green, between College Street and Dartmouth Hall. The “Campus,” of course, was what’s now called the Green.

The recently-completed facilities adjacent Thompson Arena comprise the Boss Tennis Center with its entrance in the Gordon Pavilion, the east facades of which are depicted here:

and the Scully-Fahey Field for lacrosse, field hockey, and other sports.   Its triumphal arch is the largest gate at Dartmouth:

A press release has more on the Varsity House, soccer field, gym, and other projects.

The Dartmouth reports that Stanley Smoyer, 1934 is donating $4.5m for the new soccer field and stand south of Thompson Arena, to be named for coach and Athletic Director Alden “Whitey” Burnham.   The D has an image available showing the view to the southwest along Park Street with Thompson at the right.

This month’s Dartmouth Life has an overview of the nine largest projects underway, with images of several of them.   Two that have received little press lately but seem to get the go-ahead here are the Visual Arts Center on Lebanon Street (Machado and Silvetti) and the Tuck School dormitory/classroom complex that sounds bigger than when first announced:

The facility will consist of three connected buildings: the east and west residential buildings, and the central classroom and learning bulding.

That facility will be connected to the existing Tuck complex and designed by the firm that designed Tuck’s most recent addition of Whittemore Hall [more], Goody Clancy.

Among the projects to be funded by the new fundraising campaign is a soccer facility.