Dartmo.

As the irregular grassy plot in front of the River Cluster becomes better defined and and is transformed into a front door to the Tuck School (through the school’s Whittemore Hall), the space needs a name.

Landscape architects Saucier & Flynn have mentioned “Whittemore Green” in town planning meetings (pdf).

The campus map released in February now shows Fahey-McLane and other new campus projects, as well as the new commercial buildings of the South Block, below South Street.

Harvard’s campus map, probably because it is not required to show accessible entrances and parking lots, seems to have a bit more visual appeal.

Princeton has a master plan that is very well illustrated with maps. Unlike many master plans, it gets right to the details and shows specific sites for future buildings, at least those planned for the near future.

A major theme of campus planning in the early twentieth century seems to be the redevelopment by a college or university of a large discontiguous tract. Whether for purposes that are mostly or partly non-academic, the common characteristic is the form: a treelined urban grid, not an academic campus of connected grassy spaces. The South Block project in Hanover (purchased 1998, redeveloped 2005-2007) is one example. Penn has its parcel, Columbia is pursuing its huge work north of its campus (see Plan NYC; pdf map), Yale just purchased a suburban pharmaceutical research park, and Harvard is beginning its Allston redevelopment (map; aerial rendering; Globe article). Allston might be the largest of the group, and it is meant to be “sustainable.”

[Update 11.17.2007: An August article by Jeff Stahl in Urban Land (pdf) covers this trend.]

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).

Saucier & Flynn offer a small version of what looks like a lushly-detailed landscape master plan for Dartmouth. The Tuck Mall portion is especially notable, since it shows the initial portion of the mall (what was the entire mall during the 1910s) as a broad academic field lined by paths, and only the more distant portion with a road in the center as is the case now.

The school put a sidewalk in on the north side of the mall last month, according to an article in The Dartmouth. The article did not note whether the sidewalk is the first step in implementing the master plan’s proposal for Tuck Mall.

[Update 07.24.2007: The Planning Board minutes of June 6, 2006 (pdf) suggest that the sidewalk project is an implementation of the master plan.]

The Dartmouth provided an update on the Visual Arts Center, and the designers have an unlinked project page that states:

A new facility for the college’s Studio Art and Film and Television departments, the Visual Art Center represents the consolidation in of two related programs for the first time in the college’s history. The new center occupies a prime location and consequently must function not only as an educational space, but also as a new entrance to the both the campus and the arts precinct. An 80,000 square foot building, stretching along a length of Lebanon Street from the Facility Operations and Management department to Spaulding Auditorium in the Hopkins Center, the new building is given a sizable portal that frames the existing Hood Museum complex and functions as a door to the south entrance of the campus. Commercial programs will mix with the educational functions along the street to further enhance the town’s Master Plan.

A few well-illustrated recent studies share a recognition of the urban nature of the college campus:

• R.M. Kliment and Frances Halsband (designers of Burke Laboratory) propose a pragmatic route called “The Walk” (pdf) running through several varied urban blocks to tie together isolated properties owned by Brown University.
• Yale’s extensive “Framework for Campus Planning” (pdf) by Cooper, Robertston & Partners maps the trash-collection routes of Yale’s campus while noting that most buildings there have university names as well as street addresses; the scale comparison of Yale to the other Ivies (including “Dartmouth University”) is interesting. The plan covers signage, noting the six official typefaces and proposing a unified system. Cooper, Robertson is also working on Harvard’s huge Allston expansion.
• Oxford has a master plan (pdf) by Rafael Viñoly for the site of the Radcliffe Infirmary, up by the Royal Oak pub. It offers several Parisian blocks lining pedestrian avenues that focus on the Radcliffe Observatory, which is the chief building of Green College.

Rogers Marvel Architects have added some images of the buildings they proposed in their 2000-2002 arts master plan. The plan helped suggest the siting of the Visual Arts Center currently in design by Machado and Silvetti.

Landscape architects Saucer + Flynn have posted new information including descriptions of eight projects for Dartmouth as well as landscapes for North Park Street Graduate Student Housing, 7 Lebanon Street, the DHMC, projects in Centerra, and the Sphinx.

The firm also designed a wrought-iron fence for Skull & Bones in New Haven, which is not the kind of landscape project you see every day.

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).

Landscape architects Winston Associates announced during 2004 (Internet Archive page) that Dartmouth had selected Winston and Wolff-Lyon to plan a 200-unit Sand Hill neighborhood that would include an integrated parking/transit transfer center.

Sand Hill does not seem to be a prominent landmark in Hanover or Lebanon. A Parking Committee Recommendation describes Sand Hill as an undeveloped site with room for 450 parking spaces, while the OPDC parking spreadsheet (Excel file) indicates that 300 new parking spots are expected to open in the Sand Hill Lot during fiscal year 2007.

The Boulder-based firm of Wolff Lyon Architects, which developed some of the guidelines for the massive redevelopment of Denver’s Stapleton Airport as a town, worked with Boulder landscape architects Winston Associates to complete a master plan for Dartmouth’s total reconstruction of its suburban Rivercrest housing development, north of CRREL and south of Kendal. This project, also known as Dresden Village in planning documents, seems to be taking a while in the town’s regulatory process.

(More on the firm from Wellington in Breckenridge, Colo. Is it coincidence that the master planner for Kendal at Hanover, adjacent Rivercrest, is another Boulder firm, Architecture Incorporated?)

[01.25.2007 Update: Winston link added.]

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.

Dartmouth is demolishing an entire purpose-built masonry dormitory for what appears to be the first time in the school’s history; photos of the demolition of Hinman Hall, in the River Cluster, are surprisingly similar to photos of the construction of the building. Hinman is making way for the Tuck School’s Living-Learning Center.

Many thanks to the Review for mentioning this site in an interview. A few points will always get jumbled over the phone, and this might be a good opportunity to clarify them for the record:

• “National Historic Registry” should read “National Register of Historic Places” and “the register.”
• “There are state and federal tax breaks” should read “There are state and federal tax breaks for renovations. . . . In addition, anything that gets on the list has to have the owner’s permission to get listed.”
• “There are state and federal tax breaks . . . largest in terms of commercial properties but still significant for even a home owner. But the real reason for a college to apply is that it is a blue ribbon” should read “Now, if you’re a college or university that’s not a homeowner and not a business, the real reason to be on the list is because it’s a seal of approval. It’s a blue ribbon. . . . Those tax breaks only come when you renovate your building, generally.”
• “Clement will be supplanted by a new visual arts building designed by McCado and Silveti–a very academic, theoretical type firm–to go on that site” should read “The firm of Machado and Silvetti – big names, a very theoretical, academic-oriented firm – are designing a new visual arts building to go on that site.”
• “Loews–that notoriously hard to find movie theatre–will, I think be moved next to the site on Lebanon Street” should read “Loew’s Auditorium will move from the Hood into this new building, and I have a feeling it will be placed on the street, on Lebanon Street, so that it will become more of a public movie theater.”
• “If you go to Oxford you will typically see a dining hall in the vicinity of the chapel” should read “If you go to Oxford, you will typically see a dining hall in the same ‘range’ ([i.e.] the same building) as the chapel.”
• “I don’t think it should necessarily be torn down or replaced, but it should be amended” should read “I don’t think it’s a terrible building, and I don’t think it should be torn down: I think it should be improved. . . . That said, I think Dartmouth is pretty fortunate to have Murdough and the Choates as their potentially worst buildings.”
• “I suppose the Fairchild center gets a lot of censure, and it is incongruous. But it is cool. And it was meant to be presentable. I don’t think it’s completely convincing. But at least it is presentable” should read “It is incongruous, but at the same time, when you look at it, you can tell . . . there was a sense of style there – there was a lot of skill put into it. It’s very cool and modern — cool in the sense of being refined, you know, the steel and glass, the thin skin. . .”
• “You could make a good argument for making use of the Crosby house (which is the name of the older part), and getting rid of the rest; it makes good use of that space” should read “[Y]ou’ve got all that land south of the building, between Blunt and Parkhurst, basically a vacant lot. . . . . You could make a good argument for a building there that would use the old Crosby House (which is the old part of Blunt), get rid of the rest, and make much better use of that space.”
• “Essentially it was built as a hotel, as part of the town” should read “[T]he Lodge . . . was built . . . effectively as part of the town, as a motel, and then used for a school purpose.”
• “Wheelock set it out back in the 1730s” should read “It’s one of those things that Wheelock set out back in the early 1770s.”
• “The only unfortunate thing is that it blocks access to the grad school . . . I think this is what lead Larsen to propose a large causeway to connect Thayer dining hall area with the graduate part of the campus” should read “The only unfortunate thing about it is that it kind of blocks easy access to the graduate schools. I think there was a plan by Larson in the 1920s that proposed a very long, high causeway or bridge that would have gone from Thayer Dining Hall, basically, across to the Engineering School.”
• “Yes, I hope some of that area is preserved, in particular the buildings . . . should be preserved” should read “although I hope, certainly, that they preserve at least one of those if they do use their sites.”
• “South Fairbanks being the first building designed and built by Charles Rich 1875″ should read “He designed it in 1892 . . . [but] Beta , . . . did not build it until around 1903 [after the school had built several buildings designed by Rich].”

Dartmouth acquired the Sargent Block, which contains the Hanover Inn Motor Lodge (Brooke Fleck, 1960), and it plans to redevelop the entire block. As with the South Block, this means demolishing most of the buildings.

Although the Lodge has been used for the last twenty years or so as a dormitory, it will be closed during the 2006-2007 year. The very attractive new campus map featuring dormitories also omits the Lodge.

These seem to be the first public signs that the Lodge is about to go. It will be interesting to see what the school builds in its place and how closely it follows the Town’s bold vision for the block.

[Update 08.03.2006: text corrected]
[Update 08.09.2006: "Sargent" added]

Stefanos Polyzoides‘ perceptive essay “On Campus-Making in America,” which appeared in Moore Ruble Yudell: Campus & Community (Rockport, Ma.: Rockport Publishers, Inc., 1997), is available at his firm’s website.

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.