OPDC has posted two watercolor views of the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Building: a view of the north facade, marking a dramatic entrance to Dartmouth, and one of the south facade facing the Medical School’s courtyard.

The Class of 1978 Life Sciences Building is taking the place of Strasenburgh Hall, a cramped Medical School office building. Strasenburgh was built as a dormitory, and for that reason it was the only building on the School’s “original” (1950-1980) campus not designed by SBRA: the dormitory, like its Tuck School counterpart Buchanan Hall, was designed by the consulting architects of the College, Campbell Aldrich & Nulty.

Dartmouth Medicine magazine (Winter 2006) has an article by Jennifer Durgin on Strasenburgh’s past, and it includes an excellent aerial photo of the medical campus. Strasenburgh’s small scale and busy faceting made it one of the least unappealing buildings of the group.

Joining the camera facing the Tuck Living and Learning Complex construction site is a new camera atop Dana trained on the ‘78 Life Sciences Center.

The Class of 1978 shows another rendering of the Life Sciences Center. The Dartmouth states that demolition of the three buildings on the site has begun, and notes that workers will break ground in December.

The Life Sciences Building has a name: The Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center (press release; article in The Dartmouth). The only other Dartmouth building named for a class that comes to mind was named only last year, the Class of 1953 Dining Commons.

The class plans to raise $40 million of the roughly $95-million construction cost. The architecture firm, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, recently hired a few new designers in its Pittsburgh office to handle this project in particular.

The press release announcing the gift includes the first perspective renderings available, and they emphasize what appears to be an elliptical-plan glass stair tower. The long cross-bar will be the teaching portion of the building, and the shorter north-south wing will house the research spaces and administration.

[Updated 10.20.2007: “Building” changed to “Center” in first stentence.]

Dartmouth’s steam tunnel continues to stretch northward. A thumbnail sketch:

• From Heating Plant along the Green to the Berry site (mid-1990s)
• From Berry site up Berry Row to Moore (around 1998)
• From Moore, tap into historic hospital tunnel network to reach Kellogg Auditorium and adjoining chiller plant (early 2000s?)
• From Kellogg, run northward behind Medical School to future Life Sciences Building site (2007).

The Dartmouth has recently written up the Second College Grant Bicentennial and the Life Sciences Building.

The latest Life Sciences Building plans have been posted. The site plan (pdf) is remarkable. The elevation (pdf) of the north facade shows how much lower this somewhat tall building will be than the existing Remsen-Vail.

More detailed plans and photos of a model of the Life Sciences Building are available. The building has a bit of the New Deal Post Office about it (see the Post Office of Old Chester, Pa.), while the gabled greenhouse gives it some of the feeling of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and thus Pope’s Scottish Rite Temple in Washington, D.C.

The Trustees recently discussed updates to Lo-Yi Chan’s 2001 master plan and the designs for the Visual Arts Center, the Life Sciences Building, the Class of 1953 Commons, and the New Thayer Dining Hall (press release).

Peter Bohlin, whose firm is designing the Life Sciences Building, designed the Vermont Institute of Natural Science Nature Center not far from Hanover in Queechee, Vermont (pdf).

The OPDC’s updated Construction Maps show the north campus finally knitting together.

The Life Sciences Building looks like it will serve as a gateway building, form a wall defining two of the bounds of the campus, and partially enclose an informal quadrangle at the Medical School.

The biggest news in the flood of recent announcements involves the Life Sciences Building. This undergraduate lab has been in the works for several years; it has always been clear that it must be near Gilman (the existing undergrad lab) and the adjacent Medical School, but the degree to which it would be shared by (or might even replace) parts of the Medical School has fluctuated.

The school has just announced that the building will not stand near Gilman on the site of the Modular Lab (1980s, “The Pizza Hut Building”) but will occupy the site of Strasenburgh Hall (originally a dormitory, designed by Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty, 1962-1963) and Butler Hall (the utilitarian bulding down the hill, 1964), and that the Modular Lab will still be done away with to expand the Medical School’s existing lawn.

The designer of the nearly-$100 million building is Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a firm that participated in the North Campus competition and has designed some of the most visible (and coolly, impossibly minimalist) Modernist architecture of the early twenty-first century: the Apple Stores of Tokyo (another image), Manhattan, and elsewhere.

The site plan indicates that the Life Sciences Building will not only stand near the Medical School, it will form an essential part of its campus. The Medical School’s ongoing half-departure from Hanover in favor of its suburban Lebanon campus and its decision not to claim a part of the Life Sciences Lab as originally proposed (now “the supporting systems will not need to accommodate the demands of other research sciences”) hint at a continuing Dartmouth takeover of the D.M.S. campus.

Back in May of 2005, the school mentioned that the Cambridge firm of Tsoi/Kobus & Associates, Inc. was handling the conceptual design for the Life Sciences Building north of Gilman. The school presumably then sent that design to other firms for proposals to build the building itself.

The Office of Planning, Design & Construction has revealed an unusual schedule of all the buildings and other construction projects to be completed on campus through October, 2010. This comes with a larger version of the master plan than has been available in the past. The documents state that:

-Bradley-Gerry demolition will end during September, 2007.

-The Life Sciences Building, which will stand east of Vail/Remsen, will be built starting early during 2007, with design starting soon. No architect seems to have been announced yet.

-Design for the dining hall to replace Thayer Hall will begin this summer. No architect has been announced for this project either, although Centerbrook was involved in the master planning for the student center area.

The long-planned Life Sciences building (”The Hanover Life Sciences Building,” i.e. not a building on the Medical School’s Lebanon campus) will enclose about 142,000 square feet, comprising four large classrooms, eight seminar rooms, eight teaching laboratories, and as many as thirty research labs. Although its mission as a joint College-Medical School facility makes it seem somewhat similar to Gilman, on the edge of the medical campus, preliminary maps are showing the new building somewhat north of the Modular Lab.

Centerbrook’s new Varsity House has been approved by the Trustees, but the Biology Department’s building is still in planning (The Dartmouth | press release).

In a speech to the faculty on October 31, President Wright announced: “I think we can confidently say that there has never been as much construction at any one time in our history.” Below is an excerpt from his speech as it relates to each future building project, with speculation about the architects added. In the context of architecture as a world art form, the most important project is the first listed here; the project that is most important to the school is listed second:

• “We are already in the planning stage for the visual arts center and will be continuing that process during the coming months.”
  –Designer: Machado & Silvetti

• “In the area of student life we are also in the final stages of planning a new dining hall north of campus, and a replacement dining hall at the current Thayer Dining site. The Class of 1953 has provided the funding for the north of Maynard Street facility, which will include space for graduate students. The dining projects will be staggered and will cause some disruption as we will need to complete the north of Maynard project before we begin at the Thayer site.”
  –Class of ‘53 Dining Hall designer: presumably Moore Ruble Yudell
  –New Thayer Dining Hall designer: possibly Centerbrook

• “The Tuck School has plans for a living and learning center and they are moving forward with that aggressively. They already have most of the funding in place and are working on construction design, with the intent of starting construction during the second half of next year.”
  –Designer: Goody Clancy

• “The Medical School is moving ahead with their plans for a translational research building to be constructed near the hospital in Lebanon.”
  –Designer: possibly SBRA

• “The Grasse Road III project, currently before the town for approval, will provide more affordable housing than can be found in the local market.”
  –Designer: unknown, possibly William Rawn Associates

• “The life sciences building has been a challenge both in terms of fundraising and planning. Our original notion of a shared laboratory facility with the Medical School has evolved, and we are now thinking about a facility on the Hanover campus that will be primarily for the Biology Department, with only some classroom and meeting space for the Medical School. While this remains one of my very top priorities for fund raising, we are also looking at ways to use debt financing and internal resources to ensure that this project moves forward in a timely fashion.”
• “I have asked the Provost to review plans for renovation of the Dartmouth Row buildings and Carpenter Hall.”

Among the projects slowed but not halted by the downturn is the Life Sciences building at the north end of campus on College Street: “As currently conceived, the structure would provide a new anchor to the northern entrance to campus as well as a key building for the medical school,” writes Provost Scherr in his letter to the Planning Board.