Dartmo.

Centerbrook’s page for its master plan for the Hood suggests that the existing connector to Wilson Hall could be preserved, and it shows the new addition as rising behind the connector.

The addition will obscure most of the front of the Hood Annex, but it will be largely hidden from the Green. In this conceptual plan, at least, the addition is given a signpost in the form of a sort of Joseph Hoffmann ziggurat.

This plan is only a general guide, but it suggests that the preservation of the Wilson Hall entrance is a lost cause. The second and third images on the page show the entire entry below the arch — the stairs, vestibule, door, fenestration, and inscribed granite lintel — demolished and replaced with glazing.

Wilson Hall’s front door will become the Hood Museum’s new principal entry and be transformed by large glass windows to convey transparency and engage passersby on the busy campus green.

A Romanesque building is not the best place to look for transparency… Perhaps a projecting pavilion supporting prominent signage would be just as good, and would also preserve the building’s most distinctive elements. Living with an obtrusive but well-designed entrance and ramp structure outside the building would be a small price to pay to retain the experience of passing through the building’s substantial doorway, with its surfaces of oak, brick, granite, sandstone, and glass.

This master plan led to the Basis for Design for the expansion, and that document will lead to the designs that Williams and Tsien are now beginning. Little more than the general siting of the addition is likely to carry over from the master plan.

More details on that Basis for Design from Art New England (pdf), published a while back:

We intend to go back to the original skin of the building by tearing out the offices and dropped ceiling and returning the Picture Gallery to its original state.

Hood Director Matthew Taylor is referring to Wilson Hall. That link is found in the Hood’s comprehensive page of links about the selection of Williams and Tsien.

Back in March the board approved a 2013 budget that includes funds for “campus-wide master planning.”

This is good news. There was some concern that insufficient attention was being paid to the master plan; Dartmouth likes to update its master plan every ten years or so, and the 2002 plan by Lo-Yi Chan and Gordon DeWitt (pdf) is ready for refreshing.

The process should be especially interesting this time around. The word is that the esteemed Mr. Chan is advising on the project and that the scope of the plan will encompass not only the campus proper but also those properties that the college owns near by.

The announcement of the selection of a firm to carry out the project should be interesting. Based simply on the school’s recent plans and its experience with the North Campus plan of 2001, one might guess that Moore Ruble Yudell and Centerbrook are likely candidates. Michael Dennis & Associates have also been doing interesting work recently. Robert A.M. Stern has been involved in work at Dartmouth for more than a decade. Who knows?

Dartmouth recently announced that it has “initiated a renovation and expansion project for the Hopkins Center and will be selecting an architect in the coming year.” Because the Hop is so large, loved, and important, this is sure to be an interesting project.

On the occasion of the Hopkins Center’s 50th anniversary, the alumni magazine has published a photo essay on the Hop of today and collected reminiscences.

Reading Jonah Lehrer’s New Yorker article mentioning the Pixar building and how Steve Jobs concentrated the restrooms in one place as a way of forcing interaction among employees reminds one of the Hinman Boxes and their placement in the Hopkins Center with the specific intention of exposing students to the arts.[¹]

The Black family’s gift for the Visual Arts Center includes the funding of an artwork by Ellsworth Kelly that will be attached to the east facade of Spaulding Auditorium this year (The Dartmouth). See this Street View for the likely site.

The publicity around the Hood expansion and the arts center refers to “Dartmouth’s new Arts District.” It seems that neither “Hopland” nor “SoWhee” has taken hold.

There is the challenge of adding to a notable building by a big-name architect, Wallace Harrison. The various firms doing careful insertions in and around the Harrison-planned Lincoln Center, including Tod Williams Billie Tsien, would be worth considering (Lincoln Center page, Times Topics).

Two recent master plans have proposed that the college graft a variety of additions onto the sides of the Hop:

• The 2001 Rogers Marvel arts center master plan (pdf, see also additional information from the firm and Chad Smith, Architect).
• The 2001 Brook McIlroy Downtown Hanover Vision plan, specifically the Spaulding Auditorium proposal.

It will be interesting to see where the new additions will go and how they will look. Will the Hop’s studio range really be demolished and replaced, as the Rogers Marvel plan proposes? Will the blank wall on Lebanon Street really get a row of shops, as the Brook McIlroy plan proposes? Will a northern addition expand the Hop proper toward the Green, alongside the original and iconic Moore Theatre? Stay tuned.

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This announcement did not get much publicity when it was published almost a year ago, but it is noteworthy: Centerbrook has completed its master plan for the Hood Museum, and the plan contains a proposal to convert the adjoining Wilson Hall into museum space.

Wilson Hall was built as the college library and picture gallery. Its attic level, with iron trusses supporting a steeply-pitched roof, was designed for the display of paintings.

After the Butterfield Museum was demolished and Baker Library was built behind it, Wilson Hall became the home of the College Museum.

Charles Moore and the architects of Centerbrook placed their Hood Museum below Wilson Hall during the early 1980s, connecting the two buildings with a whimsically-busy enclosed staircase. The firm also renovated Wilson itself for the use of the Film and Television Studies Department.

The main entrance to the Hood, of course, was hidden from the view of passers-by. Visitors have to pass through the gate and walk up a broad ramp off to the side.

Now Centerbrook proposes to demolish (presumably) the Wilson connector and replace it with a new three-level addition. New galleries, offices, and classrooms could then go into Wilson and the addition, and Wilson’s presently shadowy entry arch could become the entrance to the whole museum complex:

With some improvements for access to the handicapped, Wilson Hall’s front door will become the Hood Museum’s new principal entry and be transformed by large glass windows to convey transparency and engage passersby on the busy campus green.

Although the large glass windows are a bit worrisome, the overall plan sounds like an excellent one. Will the Hood’s original ramp-entrance remain, or will it too be altered?

[Update 04.05.2012: Wilson portrait gallery image added.]

Haynes & Garthwaite designed the recent renovation of the President’s House on Webster Avenue.

In the long term, wouldn’t that building make a great center for student religious life (a new Edgerton House, for example) or a headquarters for an academic institute (a new home for the ISTS)? Either function would be able to handle the noise of Webster Avenue better than a college president can. Land is available to the west to add two more houses if more space is needed.

The president, in turn, could be installed in a new house in the residential neighborhood on Choate Road, near the Dean’s House. Purpose-built for fundraising, the President’s House could share the former Choates dormitory site with some appropriate new student housing.

This map, based on the official campus map (pdf), shows Edgerton House, the President’s House, and the site proposed for the new President’s House in red. The new President’s House would anchor the northern terminus of the Great Mass Row Axis, also in red. Some of the other student religious centers are shown in blue.

Other possible sites for a new President’s House include the Dragon area, considered during the 1920s before the Webster Avenue site was selected; the south end of Occom Pond; the northwest corner of Rope Ferry and Clement Roads, a marvelous and prominent site that cries out for a building; and the northeast corner of Rope Ferry and Maynard.

I. Background

The site where Leverone Field House and Thompson Arena face each other across South Park Street, with a couple of houses in between, is an interesting one (Google Maps aerial, aerial, street view entering from the south). It is getting some attention these days.

First, the transit report proposes a bus shelter here (pdf).

Second, Athletic Director Harry Sheehy commented in an interview in the Alumni Magazine that the school needs another field house. Chase Fields seems a likely site, and the building could even take over a part of the Thompson lot facing South Park Street.

Third, the owner of the private house just below the entrance to the parking lot, at 31 1/2 South Park Street, has demolished the building and is replacing it with a three-story building containing a dental office with apartments above (Planning Board minutes Sept. 13 (pdf); see also Planning Board minutes Sept. 6 (pdf)).

All of this activity gets one thinking about the two old houses in front of Thompson Arena at 25 and 27 South Park Street, both designed by Jens F. Larson.

On the one hand, the presence of the two houses preserves the historic appearance of the east side of the street and maintains the rhythm of solids and voids that stretches all the way up to Wheelock Street. Number 29, the Fire & Skoal house, is also a Larson product.

The view that the houses frame is interesting and surprising — it looks like there is some kind of hangar back there, and a walk along the beach-flat ground that reveals the ribs and upturned hulk of Thompson behind the brown shingled house can create a nautical impression. Removing the houses to create a plaza would be a bit arbitrary: very few people actually walk from the front door of Leverone to the front door of Thompson.

On the other hand, the two Nervi buildings were meant to face each other, and the two houses have always been meant to come out. Master plans have long proposed that the houses be removed and a plaza be constructed to link the two concrete arenas. The 2007 Landscape Master Plan included such a proposal (pdf).

II. Proposal

The two Larson houses at 25 and 27 could be moved across the street, above Cobra, and a plaza could be built in their place.

The plaza would be difficult to make uniform in footprint. The two Nervi buildings do not face each other directly. Each stands a different distance from the street and rises to a different height.

Piazza Nervi would become the student entrance to the whole Chase Fields complex. Pedestrians walking down Park Street would swing diagonally across the Thompson forecourt and then head eastward. The present route into the parking lot is relatively convoluted and disappointing.

As a bonus, the piazza could tie into a new path cut westward through the Crosby-Park block. The need for this path to Lebanon Street, the only cross-block route between Wheelock and Summer Streets, has been obvious for years, and the Ped/Bike Master Plan released in October (pdf) recommends it. A long brick wall built to shield the neighbors’ houses could serve as a venue for a horizontal climbing race put on by the DOC: speed-bouldering.

III. Conclusion

The new piazza would be the first work of architecture of any kind in Hanover — whether a plaque, monument, room, or building — dedicated to an architect.

It would make a nice gateway for drivers entering the campus from the southeast. That might be its most important function.

The danger is that Piazza Nervi would be a windswept Modernist wasteland: there is a fine line between minimalism and barrenness. But something good is possible.

I. Background.

The hope is that if or when Dartmouth builds a new heat plant in Dewey Field, the prominent field north of the Life Sciences Center, it erects a building of high quality.

More important than the architecture, however, is the siting: the building should be located in such a way that it does not impede the construction of other buildings in the future. This is the second time this idea has been flogged here.

Dartmouth needs to decide upon the potential building sites for the whole area between the LSC and the 6th hole of the golf course. It should know ahead of time whether this will be a district of brown metal sheds, academic buildings, office spaces, or even general-market apartment buildings, and how these new buildings will be organized, even if the first one is not built until 2050.

Google Street Views of the overall parking lot (up from the bottom, down from the Medical School) show the tremendous amount of space available to future builders with incomplete ideas. The sort-of road that lines the western edge of the site will form a crucial axis, as is made apparent in the set of excellent views to the north from under the Kellogg bridge and to the south (uphill).

II. Proposal.

The idea of placing academic buildings or dormitories north of the LSC should be dismissed out of hand. This site is simply too far away from the center of campus. The fact that the LSC forms a great rampart walling off the outside world suggests that the college agrees: what lies beyond the pale is not a part of the campus.

But there will be buildings built here, and there are some functions that would be appropriate for the college to develop here.

Present zoning aside, this could be a great place for commercial rental buildings with integrated parking garages. The Development Office could be here. Look to Centerra; look to the space the college is renting in downtown Hanover at the moment. This site is no farther from the Green than is Ledyard Bridge, and walking distance is obviously of little importance to non-student functions. Retail and residential uses would be essential to add life to the district when it is finally built out, but they might be too much to hope for.

What about the golf course? Add a couple of holes to the north or east; build a new clubhouse at the north end of this commercial project, or in the Reservoir Road area as a companion to the Rugby Club.

[02.25.2012 update: first paragraph reworded slightly.]

An extremely expensive new bridge and highway could clear a route through the woods from Lahaye Drive (the hospital’s southern access road) over Colburn Hill, around Boston Lot Lake, over Route 10, and over the Connecticut River to an intersection with Vermont Route 5 at the Bugbee Street exit off Interstate 91.

On the New Hampshire side, a bypass would affect Boston Lot Lake and the trails around it (map). The lake, which has a great name, might be artificial and appears to be owned by Dartmouth, as is the surrounding property.

On the Vermont side, the land between Bugbee Street and the bridge’s western abutment includes some undeveloped parcels; some commercial properties, including Blood’s Catering; a couple of house lots; and St. Anthony’s Cemetery (map).

This idea is sketched so roughly here that the elevations of the underlying north-south routes have not even been accounted for. Would the bridge go from hillside to hillside, flying over both Route 10 and Route 5? Or would it be more like the Hartford bridges, picking up local streets and crossing the river a few yards above the surface?

(At the very least, one wonders whether Lahaye Drive or Gould Road — of Sachem Village — should be pushed through to connect Routes 10 and 120 at the latitude of the hospital.)

• Virginia Tech has an official building stone quarried near the campus since 1899.

• The University of North Carolina carries out an archeological investigation before laying a new drainage pipe.

• The most interesting new campus built during the next decade might be the one on Roosevelt Island in New York. The Chronicle reports and gives an update on the proposals; the Times reports on Stanford’s withdrawal and Cornell’s winning proposal. So far the renderings of the SOM proposal leave something to be desired.

• Roosevelt Island (Google Maps aerial) could be a fantastic place for a university, sited near the center of the city and yet isolated from the grid. (The Times has an article about an exhibit at MCNY on the Manhattan grid.) Incidentally, if Manhattan’s grid were extended northward, the corner of 163rd Avenue and West 4,543rd Street would occur at Maynard and College Streets in Hanover according to ExtendNY (via kottke.org).

• The iconic St. Gall plan for an ideal monastery has been mentioned here before, and a new website (St. Gall Monastery Plan) has a nice version of the plan and several aerial views of speculative reconstructions.

• The jumbled former site of an historic hospital, the Radcliffe Area in Oxford is being redeveloped for university functions with buildings by big-name architects. Plans for buildings by Rafel Viñoly and by others have been approved. Herzog & de Meuron are designing a building there too. This was the subject of a post here as well.

• Modernist architect Edward Durell Stone, designer of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., created some notable campus buildings. They share a certain look: the Atwood Center at Alaska Methodist University/Alaska Pacific University (Flickr photo) has a lot in common with the original buildings of the University of Albany, parts of which are being rehabilitated (Times Union (via The Chronicle)).

I. A recent one-paragraph review.

One alum quoted in the Alumni Council’s annual report (pdf) stated:

The north campus is appalling. The buildings look like something from USC and it is barren of trees. Further, the buildings pointlessly drift off to the right, making it an unsatisfying prospect. Seriously, from Berry north they need to plant several thousand trees to soften and obscure this severe, inappropriate landscape.

There is something worth discussing here. The unusual wording itself creates a number of questions:

1. What does “north campus” mean? Is it the area around Kemeny, the stretch from Berry to Moore, or the stretch all the way up to Gilman? The word “severe” in reference to the landscape suggests that he* is referring to the Kemeny area, which has low granite walls. But who knows?

2. How quickly are trees supposed to grow? Berry Row was recently a construction site. One supposes the same trees are to a) provide general natural beauty (“The north campus is barren of trees”) and b) obscure a landscape.

3. The buildings drift “pointlessly” to the right: does this mean that the buildings fail to lead to a point, such as the still-unbuilt terminus of the Berry Row axis, or does it mean that the alignment of the row should follow an unbending north-south line no matter what goes on in the surrounding streets? It is obvious that the curve in the line of buildings traces of the historic curve in the town’s street grid, which in turn follows the bend in the river.

4. Is the USC comparison useful? The rather attractive buildings of USC. do not look similar to the buildings of Berry Row and do not seem to have been designed by Moore’s firm, unlike, say, certain buildings of UCLA, UCSB (Kresge College, 1971), UCSC, and Berkeley (Haas School of Business, 1995).

II. Another take.

Kemeny/Haldeman seems successful. The building’s street facade is admirably modest in scale; the twin porticos are delightful. The way the building works with Sherman to bracket Carson Hall is important and it seems well done. The towers on the inside of the block are not as notable as they could be and disappoint somewhat. The handling of the termination of the main tower’s north facade might be a mistake: it is not much of a tower if it does not even meet the ridge of the roof.

The eccentric footprint of the McLaughlin Cluster has the potential to be too quirky for its own good, but it works; the apparently arbitrary inflection is not bothersome.

A brochure-quality view of McLaughlin captured by Google Street View looks to the south toward the towers of Sudikoff and Baker. The use of granite and white-painted brick, reminiscent of Dartmouth Hall, is appealing.

Street View has a photo of the hefty sculptural light-pier at Bildner’s front entrance.

The absence of shutters on McLaughlin is a bit of a let-down, but shutters seem to be the litmus test for traditionalism in Dartmouth buildings these days: Fahey-McLane was meant to be shutterless but got them anyway, according to one account, because they were important to a donor.

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* Really a “he”? He seems to be under 40 (the youthful use of “seriously”) but might view himself as having the tastes of someone over 60 (the use of the antiquated “prospect” instead of “view”).

During the nineteenth century, horse-drawn coaches delivered people to Hanover by dropping them at the southeast corner of Main and Wheelock. Bus companies continued to use the stop, including Vermont Transit (which apparently dropped its competent dark-green identity in 2008) and Dartmouth Coach.

The college and the town are now working on expanding the transit stop and moving it to a more spacious site to the east, in front of the Zahm Garden (The Dartmouth; see also this Valley News story).

The new bus stop will include a shelter for the first time: the shelter is likely to follow the basic design set out on page 19 of the Advance Transit bus stop design study by ORW (pdf). (ORW also created the new Ped/Bike Master Plan (pdf), which is particularly relevant to the college; see the College Planner’s post on the plan.)

The design of the little shelter in front of the Zahm Garden might involve a variety of considerations:

1. The history of the Inn Corner and the south end of the Green. Moving the bus stop eastward gives a bus space to pull up but also reflect the loss of the pedestrian’s freedom to use the street, a result of the growth of the auto (see Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” article “The Pedestrian Loses the Way,” New York Times (Nov. 13, 2011)).

2. The grassy island that once occupied the center of East Wheelock Street. Possibly a remnant of the Green from before the corner was cut off, the median was the site of a substantial masonry traffic marker for a time. The bus stop study proposal notes that “[a] small median is an optional element that can serve as a pedestrian refuge and act as a traffic calming feature.”

3. The Wheelock Street crossing. The study does not seem to show the crosswalk to be the raised feature that The Dartmouth mentions, but students would benefit if the crosswalk were elevated to the level of the sidewalk. This could be just the beginning — if the sidewalks were protected with bollards, the raised walk could be extended to cover the entire street between Main and College.

4. Architectural concerns. The new shelter could be made of glass in order to be overlooked, or it could be designed as a proud pavilion that establishes an axis with Baker Tower. It should not be so valuable that it could not be replaced in the future by the Hopkins Center wing that really belongs on this site.

5. The Hop’s somewhat unsuccessful landscaping. The isolated patch of grass north of the Zahm Garden does little more than pointlessly narrow the sidewalks that surround it.

Just a thought.

The Planning Board minutes of September 20 (pdf) mention that pedestrianizing Main Street, presumably between Lebanon and Wheelock, was considered several years ago and did not receive the support of the Chamber of Commerce.

The malls in Boulder and Charlottesville are fantastic places that appear to be successful, but each also seems to require a population that is much larger than Hanover’s. The extreme fluctuation of the college population would drain the life out of a Hanover mall far too often. The questionable closure of South College Street in the 1960s leaves no alternative route for the traffic that would be shunted away from the upper end of South Main Street: creating a pedestrian mall would be a radical and risky venture.

A better move might be to turn the diagonal parking on South Main Street into parallel parking, widen the sidewalks, raise the street surface, and define the edges of the street with bollards. Restaurants could claim spaces for outdoor seating, and the existing trees and benches would become less of an impediment to foot traffic. Northbound and eastbound traffic would be encouraged to use Lebanon Street and Park Street.

The Dartmouth reports on the project, and the Planner has some closer photos. The D also had an article in July. (The Planner’s Office now has not only a blog and website but also a domain name, dartmouthplanning.com.)

Although the dock project includes bank stabilization and plantings, it continues the trend of intensified development on the east bank of the river between the bridge and the canoe club. As recently as 1985, the docks were less noticeable, the bridge was smaller, lower, and much less prominent, and the assertive boathouse was nonexistent.

Instead of maintaining the fiction that this limited site is a part of nature, could it be developed heavily, with a broad granite pedestrian corniche? Let’s promenade on the Ledyard Malecón.

A graphical article based on research by Barbara Krieger in the July/August Alumni Magazine nicely covers a larger exhibit in the History Room in Baker. It is good to see the site for the amphitheater named as Murdough rather than the Bema, which is the site that that drawing is usually said to describe.

One or two quibbles: the 1931 courtyard Inn on page 53 was meant not not the Robinson Hall area but for the Spaulding Auditorium site, as is shown on the exhibit’s Dartmouth House Plot Plan. The gateway shown in the Larson drawing would have faced east, and Lebanon Street is depicted on the left of the drawing. (The main block of the current Inn was completed in 1967 rather than 1887.)

The focus on the Dartmouth Hall cupola is a bit of a wild goose chase. The plans depicted are by William Gamble and show a masonry building that was never built. Dartmouth Hall was built from some other plans, long since lost, that almost certainly showed a cupola. Those plans might or might not have been by Gamble and probably were not by Peter Harrison. (The cupola that Tucker admired was probably a somewhat different midcentury replacement for the original.)

Here is an image that did not make it into the article, a pre-Leverone proposal for a field house by Eggers & Higgins:

Wow. That is a view to the southeast from above the gym. South Park Street runs behind the field house, and the field in the upper right corner is the site of the later Leverone Field House.

The article quotes Eisenhower on “what a college ought to look like.” Conan O’Brien recently paraphrased this commentary while adding something of his own:

It’s absolutely beautiful here, though. It is the quintessential college cam-… American college campus. It does look like a movie set.

(Video, at 1:27.)

Dartmouth will build a relatively elaborate ADA-compliant swimming dock and a kiosk upstream from the bridge (The Dartmouth).

The College Planner’s blog has a post with a plan (pdf) and a detailed regulatory submission (pdf). This project is part of something bigger: a master plan for the riverfront (Planning post, post).

Smith & Vansant Architects now have a page detailing their extensive reconstruction of and addition to the Zeta Psi house.

The college is looking for a site on which to build a house for the Alpha Phi sorority (The Dartmouth).

The Dartmouth has a photo of the new modular Sigma Phi Epsilon house.

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).

• 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 an article in The Dartmouth).
• 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.

[Update 01.22.2011: Links to shoe and horning articles added.]