Dartmo.

• A nice reproduction of the famous photo of the burning of Dartmouth Hall is on line. This view to the southwest shows the rear of Dartmouth Hall, not the front. The photo seems to have been taken a moment after a large explosion — a smoke column is blasted horizontally from the northeast corner of the building at the second-floor level. Many of the students nearby are sprinting away, and some are turning to look back at the building.

• The Band is getting rid of its old style of uniform, a green wool blazer over a white turtleneck, white pants, and white tennis shoes. That combination seems to have lasted about 45 years.

• In August, the Planning Board talked in hypothetical terms of several potential development projects on Lyme Road, such as a tennis club north of the Chieftain (pdf), a golf course and country club around the junction of Lyme Road and Old Lyme Road (pdf), and others (pdf).

• The official traditions page is irritating not just because of the punctuation, the capitalization of “the HOP,” or the use of sentences like “It’s far different than [sic] you’re imagining.” Nor is it because of the claim that Homecoming was established in 1884, when Dartmouth Night didn’t even exist with or without a bonfire until 1895. No, it’s the statement that the school’s chartered mission is “… education of Indian youth … and also to educate English and others.” The Charter contains the true mission, which is “the education & instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes … and also of English Youth and any others.”

• An early-1960s photo of the Hop excavation looking southwest from around Wilson Hall.

• Ask Dartmouth has put up some interesting posts lately, covering the Lone Pine, with a super photo of College Hill probably taken from the steeple of the College Church; the Hinman Mail Center (what it doesn’t say is that the student mailboxes are called Hinman Boxes, and until the mid-1990s the USPS tolerated the use of HB numbers in mailing addresses); the pendulum in Fairchild; and Sanborn Tea, still 10 cents a cup.

• Rauner Library’s blog has too many interesting posts to keep up with. See, for example, the post on the color Dartmouth Green.

• The Hanover Improvement Society has a smaller membership and larger ambition than one might expect.

• The New Hampshire Good Roads Association of 1904 is a remarkable survivor from the pre-auto era, when bicyclists were the interest group demanding that the highways be smooth.

• The bus stop study (pdf) recommends the removal of the curb cuts at Hanover Park (Google Street View). Bravo. That building would be so much more inviting if it did not pretend to have its own driveway.

• Dartmouth and the Mac: The Valley News article about Apple products in Hanover doesn’t focus on Dartmouth’s long-time maintenance of a Mac-centric campus. The college turned its Mac expectation into a requirement for all entering students in 1991. That seems fairly early until one reads about Drexel selecting Apple in 1983 and requiring Macs as soon as they appeared in 1984 (Drexel’s Steve Jobs memorial events).

• The unpaved paths on Whittemore Green should be applauded (Street View).

• The lively Congregational Church building in Wilder (Olcott), Vermont was designed in 1889 by Edward Goss. Following a renovation, it has become the Charles T. Wilder Center (U.K. Architects, Trumbull-Nelson, Lyme Properties). Charles Wilder was a mill owner who also gave buildings to Wellesley and Dartmouth.

• The Center for Cartoon Studies in WRJ is moving into a new headquarters (Valley News). The Center’s students occasionally create or display works at Dartmouth.

• National Geographic Traveler ranks the Dartmouth Winter Carnival sixth among world carnivals. That is pretty good, considering. The number one carnival is Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous. (My high school band was scheduled to play the Rondy parade but pulled out when cold weather was forecast. Why not just wear warm clothing? Because this was the one time in three years when we could wear our official uniforms. Why not just play out the windows of a bus? Because the last time the band had tried that, spectators had pelted the bus with snowballs all the way down Fourth Avenue: if they were going to stand around and watch a parade when it was 20 below, the least the band could do was actually march.)

• Women’s Hockey won at Fenway (!) recently (Valley News). Fenway’s paint color was described as “Dartmouth Green” in 1934, and that color seems to have been used when the Green Monster was first painted in 1947. The shade used on the Green Monster does seem to have been lightened since.

• Dartmouth Now has a piece on “cabinhopping.”

• New notice of old projects: Centerbrook’s Wilder Lab addition; Lavallee/Brensinger’s Red Rolfe Field and DHMC Patient Training & Safety Center remodeling, and Red Rolfe Field; and Truex Cullins’s Buchanan Hall alterations.

• The Real Estate Office’s new office building at 4 Currier, designed by Truex Cullins, was awarded a LEED Silver rating.
• College Photographer Joseph Mehling ’69 is retiring (The Dartmouth). Among hundreds of college-related projects, Mehling provided the photos for the Campus Guide.
• The Rauner Library Blog notes that the Freshman Book – the Shmenu – was last printed on paper in 2009.
• CRREL, the Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory north of campus, was giving tours recently (Valley News).
• Old fire insurance maps of American cities and towns produced by the Sanborn Map Company are invaluable to historians. A post at Bibliodyssey features the elaborate designs displayed on the title pages of Sanborn maps.
• According to hikers interviewed for an article in The Dartmouth, all of Hanover’s mile markers for the Appalachian Trail are inaccurate. Experience with the Milepost on a couple of drives up the Alcan suggests that the inaccuracies result from the practice of rerouting the trail.
• The watering trough that once occupied the southwest corner of the Green is featured in a post at the Review.
• The ongoing basketball office renovations in the Berry Sports Center are planned to include a “display of Dartmouth basketball history and tradition” (Valley News).
• The Dartmouth had an article back in May about how Rauner librarians hope that the players of new metadata games will help them attach information to untagged photos.
• Randall T. Mudge & Associates Architect has exterior and interior photos
  of the Dragon Senior Society hall. The interior paneling, taken from Dragon’s 1931 hall behind Baker, really does look like a Larson & Wells product.
• The site What Was There brings rephotography into the digital era by superimposing historic photos on Google Street View images.
• Yale’s new residential colleges site has a nice site map (pdf) showing existing colleges and site of the two new colleges designed by architecture school dean Robert A.M. Stern. The Grove Street Cemetery really is in the way…
• An article explains the move from the old hospital north of Maynard Street to the new DHMC complex in Lebanon 10 years ago.

Back in May, the Lebanon High School Times began reporting on a giant new building planned for Heater Road. The building and its parking lot will fill much of the northwest corner of Heater and Route 120:

This is is not particularly near to the hospital; in fact, that’s Fort Harry’s/Fort Lou’s/The Fort in the lower right. The third building up Heater Road, the one with smoke coming from the chimney, will be demolished to create an access road. A second access road will head west from the site, reaching all the way to Old Etna Road.

Chris Fleischer wrote in the Valley News:

On Heater Road in Lebanon, 11 acres of land has been cleared to make way for a $38 million medical office building that will be home to about 200 Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center physicians, nurses and staff.

While enjoying a fairly low profile in the press, this project is not exactly new. A Lebanon wetland permit for the project is dated July 2008 (pdf). Fleischer’s article notes that the building was first proposed by a different group in 2006.

Graduate Studies at Dartmouth (or “the Graduate Studies programs,” collectively lowercase) haven’t given the impression that they form a single school or college. Over the past several years, however, they have unified under a logo comprising the Old Pine, likely derived from the Bicentennial Flag, inside an oval. The oval logo is reproduced in a prior post and is vestigially visible on the current Grad Studies site.

Now Graduate Studies have a new coat of arms with a kinship to those of the other schools:

Graduate Studies coat of arms, from Graduate Studies

This shield has a woodcutty form similar to that of the recent Thayer School arms. The year “1885″ (I think) in the base would be the year that Dartmouth granted its first Ph.D. degree; there is no singular institution here to claim a foundation date. (Some sources have Dartmouth giving a Ph.D. in 1877 to astronomer John Robie Eastman of the Chandler class of 1862.)

This iteration seems to place the numerals with a bit more success, from the DCHCDS site:

Graduate Studies coat of arms from DCHCDS application

The white pine is carried over from the earlier oval logo, and below it the lines of the New Hampshire hills create a depression rather than the rising hill (a peak of enlightenment to be ascended, etc.) found on Dartmouth’s seal. The lines also read as a pair of cradling hands.

It turns out this coat of arms is the product of a competition held last October. The competition brief required a representation of waves (have I misread those lines? The tree is growing out of the upper line) and referred contestants to the shields of Tuck, Thayer, and DMS — but not of Dartmouth itself. The brief also required entries to show the year 1960, which is when the current crop of grad programs began, and that must have been regarded as the “founding” year when the brief was published. There is a discussion in the comments about the advisability of dividing the year into two pairs of numbers, and some question about how and when during the competition the year 1885 was substituted for 1960.

All of the competition entries are available for viewing. Several alternate between the Grad Studies pine and the Bicentennial pine; several follow the Tuck School example fairly closely. One from SB Design deserves credit for depicting Wentworth Hall, the Grad Studies headquarters. Another sort of quarters the arms of the three Associated Schools, using the paths on the Green to divide the shield. The winning designer was Scott Gladd. (He has some alternative versions, including an intriguing one with Baker Library, in his portfolio.)

Now the logotypes of Dartmouth and its Associated Schools and related entities, as they are lined up at the bottom of the DCHCDS site, are one step closer to complete congruity. Only the hospital, the Institute for HP&CP, and the DCHCDS itself are without coats of arms.

Isn’t this interesting. Where the symbols of the appropriate programs are lined up for an online application form, both DIHPCP and DCHCDS (noted above as lacking logotypes) are represented by Dartmouth’s shield:

Row of logotypes from application.

[Update 04.25.2011: Minor wording changes and date correction.]

[Update 01.22.2011: Second image replaced with better version; note about row of four logotypes added; competition information added.]

The Dartmouth reports that the new Center for Health Care Delivery Science will start teaching students this summer. According to the paper, the Center now occupies seven offices in 37 Dewey Field Road and soon will expand there. The 37 Building is one of the old Nursing School buildings north of the old hospital; the Wikimedia Commons shows it with what looks like a recent entrance addition.

The paper reports that the Center might get a new building in the future (this site has speculated about the school’s location and whether it will need a building).

News notes on construction projects old and new:

• An anonymous donation has named the fitness center recently installed in the old gymnasium space at the top of Alumni Gym for former Trustee Charles Zimmerman ’23 Tu ’24 (The Dartmouth, Bloomberg).
• An article in the Valley News on Harris Trail at Hanover and the Class of 1966 Lodge.
• Health Facilities Management has named the DHMC complex an “icon” and the subject of one of its case studies. The SBRA announcement notes the hospital’s adoption of the shopping mall form.
• For an example of a remarkable and appropriate setting for a Beverly Pepper sculpture that shares some of the attributes of Thel, see the Weisslers’ amphitheater in New York (New York Times). See also the BLDGBLOG post on Buried Buildings.
• A building-related issue of The Mirror has some details on the Life Sciences Center.
• One hopes that the OPDC will get the chance to add a Class of 1953 Commons page to its list of projects.
• Another Titcomb Cabin update.

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.]

[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.]

In February, DHMC postponed plans for new buildings, including the C. Everett Koop Medical Science Complex, but not the offsite Outpatient Surgery Center (2008-2010, SBRA) (Dartmouth Medicine; press release; mention in Vermont Today). The building presents an interesting study in urbanism: instead of adding the needed operating rooms to its existing medical complex, the hospital is placing them in a freestanding low-rise building very near by, either because the main hospital has run out of space (!) or because surgeons in training need an experience like that of a private practice.

The Dartmouth reports that DHMC, less susceptible than Dartmouth to changes in endowments, is going ahead with construction of the two-story Outpatient Surgery Center begun in November across the loop road from the main complex (press release).

The Valley News reports that the outpatient surgery center (2008-2010) is going ahead but confirms that the Koop Medical Science Complex is on hold.

The November 13 letter from Barry Scherr and Adam Keller (pdf) stated: “We will complete planning already under way for projects which would then require additional financial resources before proceeding to the next phase: Class of 1953 Commons and the C. Everett Koop Medical Science Complex.” The three-part complex planned for the south end of the hospital is shown in a November 3, 2006 announcement and is explained in detail on its capital campaign page.