Dartmo.

• 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.]

Board chairman Stephen Mandel’s January 13th letter to the Dartmouth community mentions so many new spaces going into the renovated Inn that the building’s envelope surely must be expanding:

In addition, the “front door” to the College, the Hanover Inn, is planned to undergo a complete renovation beginning this summer. Every aspect of the inn will be touched and will result in a larger number of guest rooms, all updated, new and relocated restaurants, and modern conference facilities. The College remains the owner of the inn but we have hired a third party to manage the inn. The renovation will be funded with mortgage debt and the proceeds of the sale of the Minary Conference Center in Holderness, N.H.

The idea of having a standard conference center near Hanover has been mentioned in past master plans:

Finally, the College is exploring the feasibility of a regional conference center to further enable the dissemination of scholarship.

Lo-Yi Chan, et al., Dartmouth College Master Plan (2002), 10 (11.3mb pdf).

A conventional conference center could probably be a moneymaker, but it is hard to see how could fit on the corner of Wheelock and Main.

Although Dartmouth seems to take some pride in having a campus without any gates, it could still benefit from the exercise of defining a campus boundary and identifying the major entrances to the academic precinct. A sketch from several years ago:

This is all fairly obvious, but it does not seem to receive much attention in writing. The greatest coherence (and the greatest support for the idea of walkability) seems to be achieved by reducing the number of gates and pulling them inward.

The only site where two gates would stand close to each other is at the southwest corner of the Green. Pulling the gates toward the center would allow them to share a single gatepost on the Green itself, but that would detract significantly from the Green and would interfere with the tree on the corner. Here, the gates should spring from the Inn and C&G (south gate) and from Collis and C&G (west gate):

Again, this is not a proposal, and Dartmouth does not need any more* gates.

However, if this sort of project were built, and if it were differentiated from its direct ancestor, Charles McKim’s wonderful gates at Harvard, the builders couldn’t go wrong with a set massive rusticated granite piers supporting a timber truss. This would refer to the Connecticut river bridges, especially Rufus Graves’s arched truss of the late eighteenth century.

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* Tuck Drive was built with a brick gateway at each end. The lower example survives. More recently, Scully-Fahey Field was erected with a large freestanding gateway.

Wallace Harrison’s Hopkins Center is not just the latest in a long line of buildings planned for the spot south of the Green, it is the third of three theater complexes honoring Ernest Martin Hopkins proposed for that site. The first was designed in the late 1930s, and the second was a refreshed version of the first put out after the war, both by architect Jens Larson. The postwar version was put on hold, and by the time momentum increased again in the early 1950s, Larson had left, the Georgian idiom had gone out of fashion, and new people (notably Nelson Rockefeller) had become involved.

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A 1947 film about Dartmouth made available by the college has several shots of a large model of Larson’s postwar Hopkins Center design. The shots begin about 9:38 into the film.

The men shown discussing the model are identified as Treasurer Halsey C. Edgerton and advisory building committee chairman Professor Russell Larmon, with Hopkins Center Committee executive secretary Robert Haig also appearing.

This plan of the 1939 version is marked with the locations of the photos below. (The plan and a section are from Warner Bentley’s article “The Dartmouth Theatre,” Theatre Arts Monthly 22:4 (April 1939), 306-309.)

The narrator tells us that the proposed $3.5 million Ernest Martin Hopkins War Memorial Center will have a main auditorium seating 3,000 and ancillary spaces for music, drama, radio, “and allied activities.” When the present Hop was built, the site was enlarged, the film and broadcast functions were reduced or eliminated, and the auditorium was reduced and swapped with the theater at the bottom of the site. Perhaps the most notable difference is in the way the projects treated College Street: the model in the film not only preserves the street but places the entrance to its Little Theatre on it.

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Following are some thoughts, inspired in part by the excellent Collegiate Way site, about dividing Dartmouth into a federation of independent “residential colleges.”

This is not a sincere proposal: I do not think that Dartmouth should be divided into residential colleges, and I have no evidence that Dartmouth is considering anything related to residential colleges. The closest Dartmouth has come to something like this in recent years was its creation of the cluster program of the mid-1980s and the construction of the East Wheelock Cluster. This cluster is not a true residential college, and it was not thought of as the start of any kind of campuswide program.

This proposal is meant instead (1) as an exercise that might promote the more efficient development of the campus through small additions, and the improvement of outdoor spaces; and (2) as a suggestion of how, if residential colleges ever were to be created, they should be designed. If Dartmouth actually were to create a residential college system, I suspect that budget constraints and alumni opposition would severely limit the effort. This proposal is meant to show what a wholehearted program would be.

Each of the nine “residential colleges” (here called “consortia” to avoid confusion) is given an average of 400 beds, a faculty resident’s house, and a dining hall.

A variation on one of the consortia in greater detail.

The most important and difficult part is making the buildings contiguous or at least related and giving them legible spaces to surround. The most resistant consortium is the Wheeler-Richardson combination. The group depends on Rollins being brought in as a dining hall and the the three buildings being connected, and even then the site has no room for a faculty residence. The SAE house might work, or a new house could be built rather close to the Old Pine.

The explosion of online universities makes the contemplation of the future American college campus an interesting and fruitful proposition.

The variety of online institutions is impressive. One the one hand, there is the vast and partly-physical University of Phoenix, whose Peter Eisenman/Populous University of Phoenix Stadium was not actually made for intercollegiate athletics. On the other hand, there is the little “Yorktown University,” which runs courses for high-school students and grants credits for “life experiences” from a rented office above a Denver tanning salon. (The founder’s “Today in History” calendar doesn’t suggest that an intellectual environment prevails even there, since it credits Joseph Conrad with the authorship of The Red Badge of Courage — by Stephen Crane.) The costs saved by avoiding a physical campus would seem to allow these virtual schools to take considerable business away from traditional colleges.

It is also popular to say that the traditional college will not vanish entirely. Some students who value the old-fashioned ways will always exist, and “there will always be a Harvard.” I would go one step further: in line with the rule, attributed to Ferry Porsche, that the last car ever built will be a sports car, one could predict that the last university to survive will be a “real” one, not an online institution.

Real-world schools are developing their grounds more intensely and planning them more thoughtfully than they have in decades. Along with the maturation of the “virtual” university, any school that has a spatial presence and a sense of place seems to be making its physical campus even more of a selling point. The standards for campus design continue to rise, and university planners these days are expressly incorporating the neo-traditional principles of the New Urbanism (see also the Congress for the New Urbanism; some argue that it was only university planners that kept these principles alive for the city during the Dark Ages of Modernist planning).

Fascinating plans, for example, continue to come out of the office Michael Dennis & Associates, famous for its Classical and traditionalist Carnegie Mellon plan, a plan that is just as notable for the fact that much of it actually got built. The firm’s 2004 master plan for Texas A&M (under Projects, also depicted at the school’s master planning site) is worth viewing and comparing to what exists today [pdf]. No one knows how much pressure A&M is feeling from online competitors, but it is clear that its campaign to reclaim vast expanses of empty space is much more than simply “beautification.”

Dartmouth Heating Plant

The trend these days seems to be for colleges to drop coal (and probably oil, which is what powers Dartmouth’s plant) and go with natural gas, as at Cornell, or biomass, as at Middlebury.

From a planning standpoint alone, a new heating plant would be beneficial for Dartmouth. It would allow the Studio Art department to colonize the well-worn but supremely adaptable old heating plant. Assuming that a steam plant works as well at one end of the line as the other, Dartmouth could build an up-to-date replacement in what might be called the development zone north of the Life Sciences Center, an area that arguably should be developed densely and like a town, not like a campus.

Dartmouth is pragmatic enough that it might do a new heating plant as a metal shed. But because this is a gateway to campus, and for art’s sake, Dartmouth should have an interesting architect do it. No need to cite the great power plants through history, just look at this chiller plant at Chicago:

• Architectural Record.

• A.I.A. Chicago.

This is not to say that Hanover needs a building that looks like one by Murphy/Jahn, only that the utilitarian parts of campus could stand to be invested with some artistry.

The Dartmouth reports that the freestanding Class of 1953 Commons and the Thayer Dining Hall replacement, projects that have been on hold for about a year and a half, have both been canceled. The funds raised for 53 Commons will fund the renovation of the original Thayer Hall instead.

Dartmouth has frequently wrestled with the question of whether to have a single main dining hall or a widely-scattered group of two or more dining halls. Commons in College Hall was the only dining hall from 1901 to 1937, when Thayer Dining Hall opened. But Thayer was just across the street from Commons, and connected by a tunnel — the centrality remained.

Thayer Dining Hall

About ten years ago, Dartmouth decided to put a new dining hall at the north end of campus as the centerpiece of a group of new dormitories and a polar counterpart to Thayer (see the North Campus Master Plan). Moore Ruble Yudell with Bruner/Cott designed the building, which was to be called the Class of 1953 Dining Commons and can be seen in a series of sketches from the spring of 2007.

Detail of photo of model of 53 Commons, designed by Moore Ruble Yudell with Bruner/Cott, from 1953 Commons Sketches

This building and a temporary dining hall were to relieve pressure from Thayer so that Thayer could be demolished and replaced by a building designed by Kieran Timberlake. Known in the collegiate context for spare stone dormitories and a glass-walled dining hall at Middlebury, Kieran Timberlake considered renovating Thayer in its Basis of Design (November 3, 2006). The firm’s final proposal involved the complete replacement of Thayer with a new building set back from Mass Row.

Detail of planning alternate 1a from Kieran Timberlake Basis of Design

The firm produced preliminary designs (The Dartmouth) before Dartmouth put the project on hold in the spring or summer of 2008.

Some concern over what appeared to be the Thayer Replacement’s poor preservation practice was expressed here. So although one wishes the circumstances were otherwise, it is good to see that Thayer will survive. No mention has been made of who will handle the renovation, but judging from their stylish renovations of Davenport and Pierson Colleges at Yale, Kieran Timberlake could produce a very interesting design.

[Update 01.17.2010: Both the article in the D and the press release note that Thayer will be renamed the Class of 1953 Commons. The release also emphasizes the preservation aspect and notes that work will begin this summer and end in 2011.]

The Planning Board’s hearing of the VAC plans was delayed, and the Valley News gave the sense that some town residents wanted the Board to step outside its role and begin acting as an architectural review commission. But approval was not seriously in doubt when the hearing did take place (The Dartmouth, Valley News).

Town residents’ opposition seems to be consistently varied: some say the building is too urban, some not urban enough (or is inconsistent with the new-urbanist town plan). Some say it is too modern, some say it is not modern (or original) enough. The most interesting quote in the VN story is the criticism that the building is “a shameless copy of architecture that has existed in this country for decades.” Those words are usually used against traditional styles such as neo-Georgian (sometimes “pseudo-Georgian”) architecture as seen in buildings like Brewster Hall, which is being demolished for the Visual Arts Center.