Dartmo.

Steelworkers topped off the frame for the Visual Arts Center on June 22 (Boston/SF News). (Still no updates on the Machado & Silvetti site.)

The whole thing is shaping up just as Jeff Stikeman‘s renderings predicted.

What does not come across in the close-up rendering of the Hood vista is just how important that newly-exposed view is to Currier Street (formerly South College Street):

New renderings of the Visual Arts Center have appeared on the Project Page. Where an early page by the firm stated an area of 80,000 square feet, and articles accompanying the initial renderings pegged the building at 96,500 to 99,500 square feet, the “revised program analysis,” surprisingly, identified a need for more area rather than less: it’s now at 105,000 square feet.

The November renderings show a building that seems to have the same basic form and numbers of bays as before. The renderings include plans for the first time. The idea of ground-level retail does not seem to have survived, but the artist-in-residence gets a fantastic perch in the lantern above the campus-side entrance.

Elevation drawings also emerge for the first time, along with contextual views from Lebanon Street and a site plan and photo of a model showing the plaza framed by Spaulding.

There are also images of a sectional model of the arts forum, which is the atrium close to the Lebanon Street entrance, and other views.

This building should look expensive.

[Update 01.10.2009: Two watercolors by Jeff Stikeman have been added.]

Engineer Richard D. Kimball and his firm helped design Dartmouth’s Heating Plant and original network of steam pipes in the mid-1890s. It turns out that RDK Engineers is still around and claims that its project at Dartmouth was the first underground steam distribution system in the country.

The 2001 Arts Center Infrastructure Analysis (pdf) by Rogers Marvel with Ove Arup suggests that the heat plant eventually move to Dewey Field, north of the Medical School.  That would allow the Hood Museum or other arts functions to take over the old plant building.

New details about the museum’s storage building are available from the OPDC. Although it is still not clear where the building will stand, it will be designed by Maine’s Harriman Associates.

Artist Peter Irniq (Wikipedia) erected an inuksuk (Wikipedia) on McNutt’s lawn for the Hood Museum (Dartmouth Life; Hood News).

His coat of arms features an inuksuk:

(The Hood has been busy lately, also acquiring, at Sotheby’s, Pompeo Batoni’s 1756 portrait of William Legge, the second earl of Dartmouth.)

The Hood Museum has an interesting film of still photos from the construction of the museum in the early 1980s.

The school is putting on a conference about the carved stone panels that, during the mid-nineteenth century, came from the Palace of King Ashurnasirpal II in Nimrud, Assyria to a number of institutions in the west, including Dartmouth.

The D has a letter to the editor confirming that the demolition of Thayer Hall is not expected to endanger Humphrey’s “Eleazar Wheelock” murals.

The Darmtouth passes along the information from Dean Redman that the school plans to tear down and replace each of the Choates, one building at a time. The school’s current interest in replacing the buildings, a departure from its mid-1990s plans to add to them, is no secret; the specifics of the method of destruction seem new.

Other information:

• Not only new students but all students will be housed by class.
• The two River Cluster dorms that will remain standing after the Tuck School’s expansion will be renovated as apartments.
• Hitchcock Hall will be renovated.
• Richardson Hall might be renovated as the new International House.
• The Lodge and North Hall might be closed during the fall of 2006.
• Dartmouth will demolish Brewster for the Hood Museum of Art expansion, as predicted by some of the Rogers Marvel master plans.

While Charles Moore and Chad Floyd were designing the Hood Museum at Dartmouth during the early 1980s, they were also planning a renovation of the historic market building in Roanoke, Virginia. Several elements of that sibling project survive in the market and are unmistakably Moore:

• It seems that the the Facilities Planning Office (previously the Office of Facilities Planning?) has become the Office of Planning, Design, and Construction (see the website of September 2004, showing old name while accessing current images; the name of the site directory is still “~fpo”).

  The new name is clearer and more informative, but nothing beats the style of the design office that is associated with the Capitol in Washington: The Architect of the Capitol.

• The walls are up in the McLaughlin Cluster (webcam looking south from Gilman), being built by Engelberth
• Kemeny/Haldeman is in its yellow stage and the steel framing for the tower (no name apparently announced yet) is up (photos from the Math Department project site).
• The Dartmouth has more on Fred Wilson’s exhibition in the Hood and about the Hood.
• Skypic has available aerial views (1 | 2) of Dartmouth.

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.

The firm of Jonathan Marvel ’82 (Rogers Marvel) has made available photos of a model of their master plan for the arts district (ca. 2002).   The design foresees addition to the east and west ends of Spaulding Auditorium, the replacement of the Hop studios (and Charles Moore’s Courtyard Cafe), and, most notably, an extension of the Hop’s entrance facade to the west that would double the width of that facade on the Green and provide much-needed infill for the gap in the street line.

The Hood Museum would be extended south to Lebanon Street.   A view to the southeast from near the site of Brewster Hall allows a glimpse through this Hood extension and into the courtyard.   Though a master plan is only a projection, the Visual Arts Building on Lebanon Street is in progress by Machado and Silvetti.

[Updated 08.30.2005.]

Dartmouth acquired some of the interior walls of an Assyrian palace of King Ashurnasirpal II from Austin Henry Layard’s excavations (1845-), Vox reports.   Layard also sent some reliefs to Canford Manor in Dorset, most of which later were sold but one of which remained next to the dartboard on the wall of a boys’ school snack shop until its rediscovery in 1992.   The panel sold at Christie’s for $11.8m, money that the school put toward some Assyrian Scholarships.