Dorms on Lyme Road?

Dartmouth News and the Valley News report on the college’s interest in developing the land north of the Life Sciences Building, including parts of the golf course. The possibility of such development was spelled out in the master plan some time ago, but the noteworthy new detail is that the college is considering building dormitories on some part of the site.

First reaction to the dorm idea: This is an unserious proposal, a negotiating tactic, like the College Park dorm idea. It is a silly idea. The ten-minute walking radius from Baker is not just a guideline, it is a crucial rule of campus composition. Plans for transit do not eliminate the ten-minute walking radius, and it just does not seem appropriate to have students riding the school bus to class in a place as small as Hanover.

After a closer look: From Baker Library to the Dewey Field parking lot site might be a half-mile and take nine minutes to reach on foot, making it technically acceptable. It is about as far away as the River Cluster was — not an admirable standard, but a Dartmouth precedent. One hopes that the Dewey Field site is the only one they are talking about for a dorm, because any site beyond it would be unacceptable.

(What about the college-related buildings that are not part of the everyday life of students or faculty? Storage libraries and development offices and various back-office functions would be perfect for the golf course sites. They would be much better sited here than in the sprawl of Centerra or in towns around the region.)

If not on Lyme Road, where could the increasing number of students be housed? (The proposed Crosby Street dorm will be ignored, because it will be used as swing space to house students from existing clusters as they are renovated.) Here are some available sites, some of them identified in the current master plan:

  • A second Mass Row
  • The Gilman site (offered in the College Park dorm siting discussion)
  • The Maynard and Rope Ferry corner (or any site on any side of Maynard Yard)

Might it be the case that the number of additional students to be housed, say 350 students, would be too large to fit on one of those sites? Yes. That is a good thing, both for Hanover’s urbanism and for the students who end up living in the new hall. Instead of building a giant barracks, the school should add additional beds to the existing campus at a combination of smaller sites within the ten-minute walking radius, including:

  • Additions to and eventual replacement of the Choates
  • An addition to Wheeler Hall
  • A dormitory range on the outer edge of College Park between RipWoodSmith and Andres
  • A dormitory range west or north of McLane Hall

Obviously these new additions will have to join existing house communities; there is nothing wrong with that. Creating a subtle and sensitive series of additions to historic buildings will be more expensive than dropping a single giant complex on a distant lot, but it will be worth it. It seems that the desire to add beds to the campus exclusively in the form of one entirely new house community at a time is driving the push to build dorms outside of town, and it is harmful.

Image of new Ledyard; selecting Ravine Lodge timbers


Co-Op Food Store in Centerra

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11.28.2016 update: DEN project page link added.

Breweries, Fullington Farm demo, suspension railways, etc.

  • The Valley News reports that the Norwich Historic Preservation Commission was named the Commission of the Year by the National Alliance of Preservation Commissions.

  • Prolific N.H. beer blogger Adam Chandler posts a short but positive review of a new brewery in WRJ, the River Roost. It’s less than a quarter-mile down South Main from the original Catamount Brewery, sadly missed. (Some friends and I built a website for Catamount as a class project in the Spring of 1995, but I don’t think we ever showed it to the company. And it’s good to see the venerable Seven Barrel Brewery still going; we ate there five times the first week it was open.)

  • It is interesting that the new plaque at Memorial Field (Flickr photo), which kinda quotes Richard Hovey’s line “The hill-winds know their name,” honors alums who: (a) [have] “served,” (b) “are serving,” or (c) “will serve their country.” Although it’s not clear why “have served” is not sufficient to cover everyone, especially since the only names known to the hill winds are those of alums who have striven, fought, and died, the implicit inclusion of international students in their home countries is a nice touch. (It almost reminds one of the memorial at New College, Oxford, to the German members who died in WWI; Trinity College, Oxford, created its own memorial listing the German and Austrian members who gave their lives “for their country” in that war just last year.)

  • ORL (as of last spring?) is now organizing its dorm info pages according to House Communities instead of the old clusters. Thus we have West true to purple, South in black, etc. Each page presents one of the nice Burakian aerials.

    There are still apparently no authentic pages by the House members themselves, not even rogue pages — although the Houses do have members. Let’s get with it, people!

  • The Valley News reported on Dartmouth’s demolition of the Fullington Farmhouse north of town. Here’s how it looked in context (view south toward town):

  • Sheldon Pennoyer Architects, PLLC of Concord designed the new Dartmouth Coach bus terminal in Lebanon, on the site of the Cadillac dealership on Labombard Road. Construction is by North Branch. See also the Valley News.

  • Beekeeping at the Orgo Farm is the subject of a news item.

  • The Dartmouth has a story on a recent celebration of the history of Dartmouth Broadcasting.

  • Courtyard Café employees will be driving a new food truck “to support programs and activities associated with the House systems” according to the Campus Services newsletter (pdf). The truck will accept only DBA payments (sounds good) and will be available only on nights other than Friday, Saturday, or Sunday (??).

  • The medical and other waste that the college and hospital buried at Rennie Farm years ago continues to cause problems (Valley News overview, cleanup announcement).

  • Neighbors continue to object to the plans for an athletic fieldhouse behind Thompson Arena. As reported by the Valley News, neighbors withdrew their zoning challenge during June but the controversy continues.

  • Back in 2009 Dartmouth Engineer Magazine published an interesting article called “Thayer in the Landscape” that depicted engineering projects by alumni around the world.

  • According to the Mac website Six Colors, the least popular emoji depicts a suspension railway. While passing through Wuppertal, Germany, this summer, I observed that city’s suspension railway, and boy is it fantastic. Wuppertal is a long city in the valley of the winding Wupper River, and the route of the elevated railway is established by the river itself rather than by the street network. The track is hung beneath pairs of great 19th-century metal legs that straddle the river. Here is a Street View showing the track along the river:

    Here is a view with a train coming along the river:

    The stations (old and new) also must straddle the river and essentially take the form of bridges.

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[Update 09.18.2016: Tuck School expansion item removed for use in future post.]

The Heater Road building, a renovation at the hospital, and a new building for the Geisel School

The Valley News reports on growth at the ever-expanding DHMC.


The kidney-shaped fraternal twins of suburban Hanover: DHMC and Centerra (from Google Maps).

(There is also a great low-angle aerial view of DHMC on Dartmouth’s Flickr stream.)

The Heater Road building (a prior post) is nearing completion. About 200 people will move there from the main DHMC complex.

Then DHMC can perform a $16.6m renovation on one of its existing buildings to add critical-care beds. (And “DHMC’s mail services are being moved off the Lebanon campus and into a former U.S. Postal Service building in Centerra Park.”)

Finally, during their March meeting the trustees voted to approve a capital budget that includes “design funding for the Williamson Translational Research Building on the medical school’s Lebanon, N.H. campus” (The Dartmouth). The press release states:

The building will house programs concerned with adapting laboratory discoveries to use in patient care, with an emphasis on multi-disciplinary problem solving in areas including neuroscience, cardiovascular science, and immunology/infectious diseases, among others.

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[Update 08.12.2012: Construction on Williamson will begin during June of 2013 and finish by September of 2015. The existing $20 million pledge will cover part of the estimated cost of $115 million. Bond info pdf, A-10.]

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to bond report fixed.]

Small items of interest

  • There is an unusual aerial view of the north end of campus in the Dartmouth Medicine magazine. It is a view from the north looking south, and it hints at the way Main Street used to cross the Green on a diagonal. The photo makes the Green’s northeast-southwest path appear to be an extension of College Street.
  • There are far to many changes in planning, development, and regulation of suburban sites in the Upper Valley to keep up with on line. Here is just one example: the Valley News reported on a new development proposed for the edge of Centerra.
  • Naturally Vermont has a Marble Museum (New Hampshire does not appear to have a Granite Museum…) and it is mentioned in a Rutland Herald story on the pervasive use of marble at Middlebury and other schools.
  • The completed addition to Spaulding Auditorium includes extra storage for the Band’s instruments, notes the construction management firm. Interesting.
  • The Valley News had a story on blazes marking the Appalachian Trail in downtown Hanover.
  • The Dartmouth reports that double rooms in Fahey and McLane will be converted to triples. It seems only a couple of year ago that Fahey and McLane were built to allow the rooms in other dorms to decompress from triples to doubles.

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[Update 01.13.2013: Broken link to construction management firm (Berry) removed.]

The Dartmouth Institute of Health Care Delivery Science

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:


South end of Golf Course with street grid superimposed
Example of town-form development

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[Update 05.03.2014: Broken link to DIHP&CP facts and figures replaced.]
[Update 09.25.2010: With all this talk of buildings, it never occurred to me that the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science would be mostly on-line.]
[Update 02.06.2010: Map added.]

Details of ’53 Commons, Baker Catalogue Room changes

The Development Office has published requests for a number of specific gifts, including the ’53 Commons Terrace. Three zones will occupy the space between the building and Maynard Street: the Portico, which is a collonaded space; the Terrace, which will have space for 100 people to sit and might be stepped downward away from the building; and the South Lawn, which has a White-Housey sound to it and will be the northernmost Lawn at Dartmouth, an equivalent to Baker Lawn.

The Graduate Student Suite in ’53 Commons will be the first headquarters for grad students of the College.

“The Scholars’ Green” is an idea for reinvigorating Baker’s Catalogue Room with comfortable furniture and other amenities. The idea is a good one, although “the Catalogue Room” would be a better name than “the Scholars’ Green.” Experience at other schools has shown that any fancy computers placed here will be used mostly for watching YouTube and that a single espresso machine will set the tone for the whole space.

Plenty of other interesting requests appear, including one for support of College Traditions.

(The profile of the Development Office has been rising, with its new offices (U.K. Architects, 2003) in 41 Centerra Parkway; it even has its own training department with a curriculum for training staffers.)

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[Update 11.13.2012: Five broken link to the Campaign for the Dartmouth Experience removed.]

Landscape projects explained

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.

Dartmouth opens tech incubator

The Route 120 tech incubator known as the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center in Centerra Resource Park [no website left] looks interesting as depicted on the website of its designers, UK Architects of Hanover.

Construction began in August 2005 (pdf) and finished last fall, according to a thorough article in New Hampshire Business Review.

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[Update 11.11.2012: Link added for DRTC; broken link to Batelle pdf regarding start date removed; broken link to NHBR replaced.]

Various building topics

The Dartmouth and Vox have covered a number of building-related topics recently:

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to Records Management fixed.]