Dartmo.

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”).

A remote tour of recent construction via Google Street View images made around August 4, 2009, judging from the Hop’s marquee:

• The north end addition to Theta Delta Chi (view to southeast);
• The east end addition to Gile and rear addition to Hitchcock (view to north showing Gile getting a new copper roof);
• Fahey Hall (view with Butterfield);
• The redone Tuck Drive/Tuck Mall intersection (view to north; the Google Maps aerial is older and shows Fahey-McLane under construction);
• The stair addition to the west end of Bones Gate (view to south showing unobtrusive one-bay addition);
• The Zeta Psi addition (view to south showing front of building with addition under construction);
• The Chi Gamma Epsilon fire stair (view to north showing roofed but unenclosed fire escape — wonder why other houses didn’t do this if they could get away with it);
• Kemeny-Haldeman (view to east; Carson terminates Webster Avenue and is framed by Haldeman and Carpenter);
• The addition to Tabard (view to south showing rear of building; the Google driver went down this unnamed alley by the Choates before thinking better of it);
• The addition to Phi Delta Alpha (view to south showing rear of interesting, almost agricultural addition);
• The new Phi Tau (view to southeast showing side; the end view to the north shows the building’s interesting proportions);
• Berry Row (view “down” to the south);
• The McLaughlin Cluster (view of “outside” to the northeast; views “down” to southwest and “up” to northeast).
• The New Hampshire Hall additions (view to southwest showing east end addition); and
• “Whittemore Green” behind Thayer School (views of landscape including flowers and curving paths; hmmm).

The Neukom Institute was rumored last year to be considering a request for an addition to Sudikoff.

Ledyard Canoe Club plans to rebuild Titcomb Cabin, which burned last spring. The logs will be put in the river at the Organic Farm and rafted down to Gilman Island. This will be the closest thing to a log drive seen on this stretch of the Connecticut in many years.

David Hooke (Reaching That Peak, 1987) gave a “smoke talk” in Commons on the Outing Club’s history. The Dartmouth reports that “smoke talk” refers to the club’s journal Woodsmoke, but it might also refer to the informal lectures of that name that took place in College Hall at the turn of the century.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates that, although not mentioning it, helps explain their Berry Library project.

Check out the buildings in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream.

The Dartmouth is doing a weekly articles on Dartmouth out-of-town, starting with the riding center at Morton Farm.

Dartmouth is offering for rent the second level of the 1910s library stacks addition to Eleazar Wheelock’s house. This could make a good society hall:

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

The Berry Row landscape project, which focused on the bowl framed by Berry and Kemeny/Haldeman, has been completed. Photos from OPDC; initial design from Richard Burck Associates.

The Dartmouth gives an update on the construction of the Berry Row landscaping.

The central path looks as if it will curve slightly, as shown in the OPDC plan, rather than take a straight shot as suggested by the Burck plan.

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 OPDC has posted photos of the progress on the new Varsity House (one of the photos shows Memorial Field in the context of the campus), the Montgomery House renovation (check the pondside facade), and the Soccer Field (with the turf in place and grandstand going in).

Most notable are the photos of the landscaping between Berry and Maynard Street, or Berry Row. See the substantial walkway that organizes the whole project, for example.

The OPDC continues its photo essay on the Bradley/Gerry demolition, and the buildings are almost completely gone.

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).

Richard Burck Associates has an interesting variation on the Berry Row landscape plan at their website, more rectilinear than the one depicted on the OPDC site.

The project also includes the landscaping of the unnamed rectangular yard in front of the ’53 Commons, which will be lined with elms.

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 campus urban space north of Berry Library does not seem to have an official name yet. Although it is smaller and less formally designed than the Green or Tuck Mall, it is analogous to those two spaces in the way it extends from Baker Library, and Dartmouth is about to give its landscape an ambitious redesign by Richard Burck Associates. The space needs an official name.

Here’s hoping it gets called Berry Row, a name that several people have suggested already.* The name is conservative, and it makes sense: the three buildings that will line the west side of the space (Kemeny Hall, some future building, and Moore Hall) are analogous to the three-part Dartmouth Row and its progeny, Fayerweather Row and Massachusetts Row. Each of those rows creates a public space in front of it that may also be known by the name of the row.

Particular sites within the space still may have their own names, such as the proposed Alumni Plaza (pdf).

• [William D. Brawley?], Interface 29:2 (Winter 1998), 10 (pdf).
• Alex Shartsis, “New Math Building Will Honor Kemeny,” The Dartmouth (22 July 1998).
• William D. Brawley, “For Some People, It’s Becoming Increasingly Difficult to Tell Where Traditional Libraries Stop and Traditional Computing Services Begin,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin (November 1998).

The creation of Berry Row as a campus space is making progress as the landscaping for Kemeny/Haldeman, designed by Richard Burck Associates, gets underway.

The big project is the Berry Library by Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates and Shepley, Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott (live construction) going in behind Baker, the school announced.