Dartmo.

• The Planner has published the Organic Farm master plan presentation boards (pdf) and posted photos. It’s not clear that the proposals show the old Fullington Farmhouse, but surely the architects wouldn’t suggest that it be demolished.
• The frame house at 44 Lebanon Street (Bing aerial) is likely to be removed to make way for a gymnasium addition to the Town’s Black Rec Center.
• One of the old Glee Club posters in the series displayed on Flickr sort of predicts Ellsworth Kelly’s 2012 artwork Dartmouth Panels.
• The Planner posts that the college is reviewing its bike rack standards.
• Historic preservation comes to the Web: CERN has its First Website Project, which has restored http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (see also BBC).

The new campus map is available to mobile devices from the Dartmouth Mobile website (Dartmouth Planning announcement). The new map is better-looking than the current map, a pdf released in August of 2010 (Flash version). The society names are spelled out in Roman type, eliminating the orthographic creativity that rendered “ΦΔΑ” as “FDA” on the current map.

Because it’s electronic, this new map has a fantastic scope. Zooming out will display everything from the hospital to the Organic Farm, and the map’s coverage includes nodes for the airport and the Skiway. The Morton Farm equestrian center is included within the known world as well.

The Dartmouth writes on proposed amendments to the Town’s zoning ordinances, including amendments that deal with athletic scoreboards. The minutes of the Planning Board from February 5 (pdf) state that Dartmouth has eight outdoor scoreboards and provide this background:

Bob Ceplikas, Deputy Director of Dartmouth Athletics, said there have been a lot of changes over the years with the set-up of Division 1 sports venues, including technology. It is more and more standard for Division 1 football stadiums to include video displays in their scoreboards. Dartmouth is now the only Ivy League school that does not provide video display. The Ordinance’s current language does not allow for scoreboards to exist as they currently do; it does not even allow for the score to be displayed. The Ordinance should be brought up to date to reflect the real purpose of an athletic scoreboard.

No comment on the possibility of a video display (one of the thrills of seeing a college football game in person is the presence of it: there is no replay, so you have to pay attention), but the idea that the scoreboard at Memorial Field could be redesigned is intriguing.

A generous donation of the Class of 1966, the scoreboard is informative, traditional, and appealing — but it could be made even better. The number of typefaces could be reduced from five or so to three. The various vertical surfaces could be brought into the same plane. The “TIME OUTS LEFT” text could be aligned in a more balanced way. A little more space could be given inside some of the white borders, and the general crowding and busyness could be reduced.

A week ago, the Orozco Frescoes in Baker’s Reserve Corridor were designated as a National Historic Landmark (National Park Service, The Dartmouth, Dartmouth Now, NHPR). The nomination was noted here last November. The Planner’s Blog has some information on the effort.

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Update 05.03.2013: An article from The Dartmouth.

Dartmouth Alumni in Design and Architecture is having a logo competition, closing February 10.

Korn Design of Boston and New York did the new branding for the Hanover Inn. Korn has also worked for the Charles Hotel and for Northeastern University, for whom it developed a proprietary typeface, Northeastern Baskerville, with Font Bureau.

At the Inn, the firm seems to have done its homework: the White Mountains photos are by Eli Burakian and

The typography for the logo is adapted from an original Dartmouth woodblock cut typeface designed in 1969 by Will Carter and Paul Hayden Duensing.

Korn has a photo of the typography in action on the Inn’s porte-cochere.

• The elm tree in front of Collis has been cut down (the Planner’s Blog). The tree stood north of the northwest corner of Main and Wheelock, as shown in the Google Street View image above.
• Adrain Dater reminisces about the early days of Thompson Arena at DartmouthSports.com.
• A Valley News article on two guys from Pike, N.H. who were going to the World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas explains the game but strangely does not mention Dartmouth, even to distinguish “beer pong” from “pong.”
• The Alumni Relations Office presents a photoset showing A History of Dartmouth in 20 Objects.
• The Valley News reports that the Lebanon Planning Board has delayed its approval of a 162,970 square foot research building at the hospital complex. The problem is traffic. (It is not clear whether this is the building formerly or presently called the Williamson Translational Research Building.) (Update: It is the Williamson according to the Union Leader.)
• The new Dartmouth website makes more and better use of the coat of arms than did the old site. A white outline of the shield is combined with text atop photographs on the President-Elect’s site (in this image) and at least one detail of a portion of the shield is blown up and used as a background in other places (in this image, reminding one of the current fifty-pence coin).
• Inside Higher Ed has an article on how the for-profit Grand Canyon University is preparing to field a Division I basketball team. Fascinating.
• President-Elect Hanlon, in his roles in planning and finance at Michigan, very likely worked with Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. The firm was brought to Michigan by then-president Lee Bollinger, Dartmouth’s former provost, and designed a campus plan (2002) and life sciences complex (2003, 2005).
• City Prints produces an arresting Dartmouth map.
• “Dartmouth is, after all, not so much a college as a collection of stories about a college.” David M. Shribman and Jack DeGange, Dartmouth College Football: Green Fields of Autumn, 8.

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[Update 01.27.2013: Williamson identity information added.]

The Office of Planning and Design and the Office of Public Affairs are putting together a new post-Flash online campus map (the Planner’s Blog).

The sample map provided looks promising: the society names have been corrected (“AZD” is “Alpha Xi Delta”) and the obscuring blue triangles indicating accessible entrances have been removed. Because the map will be on line, the accessibility information can remain hidden until a particular area is moused over (or tapped on a mobile device? Lots of possibilities here).

• Here in Hanover ran a profile of architect Randall Mudge in its Spring 2011 issue (pdf).
• David’s House at CHaD is adding a wing (Valley News).
• This unusual stucco house at 28 East Wheelock has a whiff of Larson about it; it is owned by the college (see Dartmouth Real Estate):
  
  

• A trailer for the upcoming Dartmouth ski documentary A Passion for Snow is available.
• A map art company is selling a print of a stylized map of the campus.
• Something big has happened to 8 Occom Ridge:

  The later aerial views from Google and Bing (below) appear to show a replacement:

• A Dartmouth shirt sold on eBay says “Go Green and White.” Hmmm.
• The Development Office has its own in-house PR firm, the Office of Development Communications.
• An article on archeology in Columbia, Connecticut explains that the first building of Moor’s Indian Charity School still stands, on a later foundation.
• Both the renovated Hanover High and the new Richmond Middle School have biomass plants. It is hard to imagine that any future Dartmouth heating plant would not rely at least in part on burning wood chips.
• The Dartmouth Planner reports that the Town of Hanover is beginning to rewrite its zoning ordinances.
• Last spring, van Zelm Heywood & Shadford helped renovate Burke Chemistry Laboratory (The Dartmouth).
• A recent photo of the roof of the expanded Hayward Room at the Inn, taken with the Class of 1966 Webcam:
  

As seen at Dartmouth Now, the Year of the Arts logo initially reads as a cluster of cinema searchlight beams:

But of course it is a map of the paths on the Green, with north to the left. A larger version of the logo at the festival’s website takes on the appearance of a print, or perhaps a painting.

Coverage of the opening of the Visual Arts Center may be found in The Dartmouth and Dartmouth Now. Hood Director Taylor speaks about the Kelly sculpture and its aircraft-grade aluminum in video. The Valley News has a story on the Hop at 50, and the Year of the Arts site has a timeline of the arts on campus beginning with 1962.

I. The Geisel School. The big topic in Dartmouth heraldry is the Geisel School of Medicine’s new shield, mentioned here. It contains the familiar elements of the river, pine, founding date, and book, and it omits the depiction of the old Medical Building, which was demolished about 55 years ago. It deserves an analysis of its own.

II. The Graduate Studies Program. The Grad Studies shield seems to be receiving a big push, with a banner for Dartmouth Night (Grad Studies’ Flickr photostream) and the distribution of decals to students (Flickr).

The shield carries on what seem to be the unifying elements in Dartmouth’s armorial family: (1) the use of a founding date and (2) the placement of wavy lines in the base of the shield to represent the Connecticut River.

Here is how it looks in the group (published in March, shortly before the medical shield was replaced):

The vertical year on the Grad Studies shield does not seem entirely successful in this rendition.

III. The Tuck School.

Graphically, the chunkiness of the Tuck shield, at the far right above, is appealing. It uses an extreme closeup view to cut off the building’s eaves, and its heavy line causes the shield border itself to read as part of the temple front. The Eighteenth-century letterforms are also nice and relate to Dartmouth’s seal, although they are not of the same 1990s (?) language as the rest of the Tuck shield.

The one thing that has always been disturbing about the Tuck shield is that it depicts a nonexistent building. It is not a stylized version of Tuck Hall’s portico; instead it represents a hexastyle Doric temple, like the temple at Hephaestos.

Compare the row of six squat columns without capitals in Hephaestos to the Ionic portico of four relatively attenuated columns in Tuck Hall:

Perhaps this should not be irksome, since Dartmouth’s own shield depicts a nonexistent building as well. One way to resolve the problem would be for the Tuck School to build a hexastyle temple front somewhere on its campus.

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[Update 08.16.2012: Green temple-only illustrations added.]

Dartmouth has changed the name of its medical school[¹] from the Dartmouth Medical School to the Audrey and Theodor Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth. Dr. Seuss, as Dartmouth’s most famous “doctor” [of philosophy], would seem to be as good a namesake as any.

Now the medical school fits the pattern established by Dartmouth’s two later professional schools. The current names of the three institutions seem to be:

• The Tuck School (the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College)
• Thayer School (the Thayer School of Engineering)
• The Geisel School (the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth).

The Medical School has a long tradition of changing its name, and it sometimes goes by several names at once. An 1897 note titled “Name of the School” reads:

The name of the Medical Department seems to have changed several times. In 1806 the broadside list of students is headed: “Catalogue of the Medical Students and Students of College who attended the Medical Lectures at Dartmouth University” (as far back as Sept. 20, 1782, the Trustees passed a resolution styling the College a University); that of 1811, “Catalogue … of the Dartmouth Medical Theatre;” that of 1814, “Catalogue … of the Medical Institution at Dartmouth University;” that of 1817, “Catalogue … of the Dartmouth Medical Institution.” At some time between this date and 1824 the name “New Hampshire Medical Institution” began to be used and was retained until 1880 though the official title has always been the “Medical Department of Dartmouth College.”[²]

The name “the Medical Department,” which is not explained by the note, was in use at least by 1812.[³] Other examples include “the Medical College” (1871,[⁴] 1880,[⁵] 1883[⁶]), “the Dartmouth Medical College” (1868,[⁷] 1895,[⁸] 1897[⁹]), “the Medical School of New Hampshire” (1893[¹⁰]), “the Medical Institution at Hanover” (1893[¹¹]), “the Medical School” (1809[¹²]), and of course “the Dartmouth Medical School” (1880,[¹³] 1897,[¹⁴]).

This would seem to be a good time to change the 1950s (?) shield again,[¹⁵] and it looks as if the school has already thought of that.

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[Update 04.05.2012: Caduceus corrected to Aesculapius.]

[Update 04.19.2012: Suppositional name "The Geisel School of Medicine" shortened to "The Geisel School."]

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I. The Dartmouth Company

Curiously, there is a Boston-based real estate company called The Dartmouth Company. It makes good use of serifs and a dark green color on its website and seems to operate in New Hampshire. See also the more obvious reference to the college at the Dartmouth Education Foundation.

II. The Arms of Dartmouth’s Schools

The Dartmouth College website seems to be doing something new when it describes the institution as a collection of five apparently equal schools:

The harmonization and use of the schools’ shields is commendable.

But this arrangement seems to contradict the rule that Dartmouth is the college. The “Associated Schools” — Tuck, Thayer, Medical, and lately the graduate programs — are associated with the college but are not coequals beneath a central university administration. Because “Dartmouth” is the undergraduate college, there is no need to put the letters “CA&S” before one’s class year, for example.

Tom Owen writes in The Dartmouth today:

In the discussion following Kim’s address, Provost Carol Folt said there is a “complicated set of reasons” for the gap between Dartmouth’s national and international rankings. Two of the major contributing factors are Dartmouth’s lack of a “university” title and Dartmouth’s focus on undergraduates, both of which have hurt Dartmouth’s international reputation.

[...]

Although large-scale changes may be necessary in the next decade, alumni must see new developments as part of an institutional history of adaptation rather than as a threat to tradition, Kim said.

The school’s Quartomillennium celebration in 2019 would be a good time to launch something new.

[01.25.2012 update: Education Foundation link added.]

The catalog from the 2011 DADA Exhibition is now available (pdf) and provides some fascinating information about alumni in design.

For example, Domus, the Hanover firm that worked on the new Sigma Phi Epsilon house, includes Marty Davis ’69, Bruce R. Williamson ’74, and Bill Keegan ’75.

Canaan architectural blacksmith Dimitri Gerakaris ’69 (art-metal.com) created the copper pediment atop the Rockefeller Center porte-cochere, the Rugby Clubhouse interior bas-relief, and the railing outside Baker’s 1902 Room.

The poster was designed by Emily Yen ’10 of Hanover and Anchorage.

Thanks to author Sue Reed and to DADA for permission to post the catalog.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to catalog fixed.]
[Update 11.04.2012: Domus reference corrected: the firm worked on the Sigma Phi Epsilon house, but I believe a Vermont architect designed it.]

A new group called DADA – Dartmouth Alumni in Design and Architecture has formed, and it’s holding an exhibition of work by alums from June 11 through June 19.

(Via Sue.)

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.]

• New Balance has put Dartmouth’s current midcentury coat of arms on the tongue of a pair of shoes in its Ivy League Collection (via the Big Green Alert Blog; there’s a post on The Dartmouth‘s blog).
• Rauner’s blog has notable items on Cane Rush, Foley House, “the Glutton’s Spoon,” and the practice of “horning.”
• The Valley News has an article on the renovation of the 1890 Wilder Church. The church had a lot of Dartmouth associations early on and is another benefaction of Charles T. Wilder, donor of Dartmouth’s physics lab.
• Plan N.H. is the state’s “smart growth” group, and it gave a 2009 Merit Award to the South Block project.
• There is a photo of the Zantop Memorial Garden in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream (story in The Dartmouth, dedication program). It looks like the garden finally resolves the former awkwardness of the slope in front of Richardson Hall: never a proper stone-walled terrace, but too extreme to plant with grass and try to ignore.
• The last remnant of Campion’s various long-lived stores on Main Street closed last fall (The Dartmouth, Valley News).
  
• The Dartmouth reports that the [flower-] painted panels in the ceiling of Thayer’s main dining room contained asbestos and are being removed.

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[Update 01.05.2013: Broken link to The Dartmouth repaired, broken link to The Dartmouth's blog removed.]
[Update 01.22.2011: Links to shoe and horning articles added.]

The Dartmouth Winter Carnival turns 100 years old in 2011 (Yankee Magazine has an article and slideshow, and Dartmouth Now has an article with video). A new book celebrates Carnival posters (see Rauner Blog). Accompanying the book is an exhibit in Baker (news item, Alumni Magazine has article, photo in the college’s Flickr photostream).

This year’s center-of-campus statue is an attempt to recreate the first official sculpture, of 1925 (The Dartmouth).

[Update 01.22.2011: Links to articles in Dartmouth Now and The Dartmouth added.]