Dartmo.

• The Planner has published the Organic Farm master plan presentation boards (pdf) and posted photos. It’s not clear that the proposals show the old Fullington Farmhouse, but surely the architects wouldn’t suggest that it be demolished.
• The frame house at 44 Lebanon Street (Bing aerial) is likely to be removed to make way for a gymnasium addition to the Town’s Black Rec Center.
• One of the old Glee Club posters in the series displayed on Flickr sort of predicts Ellsworth Kelly’s 2012 artwork Dartmouth Panels.
• The Planner posts that the college is reviewing its bike rack standards.
• Historic preservation comes to the Web: CERN has its First Website Project, which has restored http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html (see also BBC).

An article in The Dartmouth states not only that the North Campus Academic Center is delayed and that its projected inhabitants are changing, with DCHCDS and DICHCP moving to the Williamson, but also that past problems have included “the Board of Trustees’ disapproval of the building’s design.” Is that why it seems to have gone from partial brick to all-white?

One wonders whether a new president might bring in his own favored designers.

ADD, Inc. designed the renovation of a part of the Nurses’ School dormitory Home 37 (a.k.a. 37 Dewey Field Road) to house Dana library until the Academic Center is built. The Planner has photos of the colorful work.

An article in the Valley News includes a perspective rendering of the Williamson Translational Research Building at DHMC (small version in DICHCP press release).

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[Update 04.25.2013: Alex Atwood has a photo of a nice model and some sectional renderings of the NCAC.]

• The Advanced Surgery Center addition to the north end of the DHMC complex will open this summer (Thayer School News). A presentation about the ASC reveals that it will have a distinct circulation route for animals.
• Thayer School’s $300 House Project from a while back has been written up in The Guardian:
  

  After the contest, a workshop was held at Dartmouth University where selected designers and architects further sharpened their ideas. Jack Wilson, team leader at Dartmouth, is now preparing to build two pilot projects in Haiti, one rural and the second urban.

• Not related to anything on campus, but an interesting idea encountered while perusing aerial views of Berlin, Germany: K.F. Schinkel’s pioneering 1830s Bauakademie building (Wikipedia), demolished by the East Germans, was recreated as a cloth-covered scaffolding in 2005. It appears in current Bing low-angle aerial views.
• Charlottesville architect William McDonough ’73 (Wikipedia) shares an anecdote about attending a Dartmouth talk by Buckminster Fuller in a blog post at the Times.
• Phase I of the Collis renovation, focused on the café, is finished (The Dartmouth).
• The Dartmouth Club of New York (at the 1915 J.G. Rogers clubhouse of the Yale Club) had a pong tournament last month (more).
• New information about the 2005 SBRA master plan for DHMC is coming to light:
  

  An analysis revealed that the original DHMC organizational structure is reached its limits, necessitating a new way of organizing the campus. To provide an effective way to unify a larger assemblage of buildings, the master plan proposes a new circulation paradigm, employing a perimeter loop road that provides a sense of orientation and hierarchy to the dispersed building sites on land owned by DHMC and Dartmouth College.

Site updates:

• The fifteen-year backlog of linkrot has been tackled. All 270 or so broken links have been fixed or eliminated since November. Mobile formatting has been added and the old “Links” page was removed 11.17.2012. The html version of the “Notes toward a Catalog…” was deleted today.
• Sorry about the login screen popping up for comments. It is not supposed to appear.
• If this site proves too exciting, head over to the Lamb & Rich, Architects site. Small improvements and sometimes a few discoveries have been creeping into each iteration of the catalog of the firm’s buildings.
• Please do click on the new advertisements on the right-hand side of this page.
• Thanks to Bruce at Big Green Alert for linking to the book at Google Books and this site in a post last month about “Dartmouth University.”

One of the Strategic Planning reports suggests that Graduate Studies be given a lounge:

The lack of any identifiable social space on the Dartmouth campus is quite striking, in comparison to all our peer institutions who have endowed graduate student centers. The ideal location for this space would be near the center of campus so that it would be easily accessible and also a visible reminder of the presence on graduate students and research on the campus.

(Graduate Education for the Future Working Group Final Report (June 2012), 13.) This desire has surfaced previously in the inclusion of a graduate suite in the original proposal for a ’53 Commons north of Maynard Street (pdf).

Compare this idea proposed by a different working group (WG) focused on research, scholarship, and creativity (RSC):

To meet all these goals, our WG recommends that Dartmouth consider the formation of a new school, the first in over 100 years. The School of Advanced Studies (SAS) would be the first-in-the-nation school focused broadly on advancing RSC for faculty, graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and undergraduates. Led by a new Dean reporting directly to the Provost, SAS’s remit would be to advance RSC at Dartmouth across all disciplines and all schools. It would invigorate the research environment at Dartmouth, spearhead better organized decisionmaking on RSC, help attract top talent to Dartmouth from all over the world, create more inclusive and enriching environment for graduate students and post-docs, and foster crossdisciplinary collaboration among faculty as well as undergraduate, graduate and post-doctoral students. We envision a new facility on central campus that would house SAS and its associated programs, as well as housing for visiting scholars and conference attendees, conference space, and common spaces.

(Research, Creativity and Scholarship Working Group Final Report (June 2012), 5.)

This sounds a bit like the famous Institute for Advanced Study, which occupies a Jens Larson building near Princeton University, but that organization is independent of its local university (see also Wikipedia).

The Dartmouth reports that the college is planning to build a new sorority house on Occom Ridge in the gap between Epsilon Kappa Theta and Delta Delta Delta (Ridge House).

The house will be built for the Kappa Delta sorority during the fall of 2014.

• The Planner’s Blog announced that Maclay Architects of Vermont is working on a master plan for the Organic Farm north of campus. One proposed land-use diagram mentions a possible site for a child-care center.
• Dartmouth Now has an article on the new restaurant in the Inn, located right at the southeast corner of the intersection of Main and Wheelock.
• Wikimedia Commons has a nice reproduction of the unbuilt 1923 addition designed by Larson & Wells. Surely the firm’s only design in the Egyptian mode, the rear range placed perpendicular to the original building is difficult to read as anything but living quarters; the firm did a similarly large and even more domestic proposal for a newbuild Dragon around the same time.
• The Rauner Blog has a post on George Stibitz and his remote operation of a digital computer in 1940. The terminal in Hanover was located in McNutt.
• Vermont Public Radio has a story on the Ice Chimes sculpture. See also the unrelated Alumni Relations post on Carnival snow sculptures.
• The Victor C. Mahler 1954 Visiting Architects Lecture is now bringing one architect to campus each year for a lecture, starting with J. Meejin Yoon (Dartmouth Now).
• The Williamson is moving ahead at the DHMC complex (The Dartmouth, Green Building Council profile).

The Valley News reports that Kendal at Hanover will purchase the Chieftain Motor Inn (see also The Dartmouth. As the News reports, the fondly-recalled 23-room motel was built during the early 1950s on a 10.7-acre parcel along the River just beyond what is now the Kendal continuing-care retirement community:

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[Update 04.07.2013: Link to The Dartmouth added.]

• Baker is displaying an exhibit titled Innovation on the Slopes: The Early Years of Skiing at Dartmouth, and the Rauner blog has a post on the historic 1935 J-bar lift at Oak Hill.
• Dartmouth Now has an article on the Skiway.
• The Green Building Information Gateway has some information (pdf) on the North Campus Academic Center: The senior associate with architects KSWA is Lena Kozloski and the landscape architect is Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., the same firm that is involved in the campus plan. The building will stand seven stories above grade (presumably on the northwestern facade, with fewer stories visible to the south).
• The Master of Health Care Delivery Science degree seems to be taking on a Tuck-y flavor with its first investiture (Tuck Today). It is notable that this is the first class to finish the MHCDS program; that the program is not “online” or “mostly online” but “low-residency” (see the chart); that the ceremony took place in January, but that graduates can still participate in Commencement in June; and that the ceremony was held at the Inn. (This photo of the class from Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream seems to be the first photo anywhere to show the new eastern addition to the Inn.)
• The Valley News reports (limited access) that the Friends of Hanover Crew will have to wait another year for a new dock.
• The Dartmouth reports that a student-driven coffee stand is opening in Stell Hall.
• Universitization: Back in 2011 the college lamented the fact that it was ranked “99th by the QS World University Rankings and 90th in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings” (The Dartmouth). The QS rankings for 2012 list a non-”University” at number one and list two “Colleges” among the top six schools. Indeed, four of the top ten schools are named something other than “University.” The current Times rankings place a different school without the word “University” in its name at number one. Three of the top eight are not “Universities.”
• The Valley News has an article (limited access) on ski jumping in high schools in the Upper Valley.
• The Concord Monitor and Dartmouth Now report that the Ice Chimes sculpture has been installed by the LSC.
• The Dartmouth reports on the beginnings of the Boora project to renovate and expand the Hop.
• The Planner has more information on the Collis renovation.
• An interesting early Machado & Silvetti design for the VAC and a Hop addition shows up in the portfolio of Seth Clarke Design on pages 42 and 43. That image of the Hop footprint is actually taken from Hopland on this website.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Skiway article repaired.]
[Update 03.03.2013: Some typos and grammar corrected.]

Dartmouth Now writes:

This winter, Dartmouth plans to install the Ice Chimes, a weather-responsive sculpture that unites science, art, architecture, and music, by Dartmouth alumnus Keith Moskow ’83 and Robert Linn of Moskow Linn Architects. The sculpture amplifies both the beauty and the sound of icicles over the course of their existence, as they sway in the wind, clinking and chiming until they grow heavy with their own weight and fall into the collection bucket below.

The sculpture has an electrical heating element at the top that melts snowfall. The resulting water alters or produces sound by coating the hanging copper chimes with ice that later falls into the sheet-metal bucket. The sculpture will be on display this winter near the Class of 1978 Life Sciences Center (Dartbeat).

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[Update 11.04.2012: Location info and Dartbeat citation added.]

The Board has opened a new front in the struggle to give the Black Family Visual Arts Center an informal name:

Two weekends ago, we celebrated the opening of the Black Family Visual Arts Center (BVAC). Not only is it a spectacular building, but its presence has also transformed the plaza between the BVAC and the Hop into one of the most beautiful and inviting spots on campus, enhanced by Ellsworth Kelly’s “Dartmouth Panels” on the brick façade of the Hop. The arts district formed by the Hop, the Hood and the BVAC creates a distinctive magnet for our campus and provides a splendid backdrop for the Year of the Arts at Dartmouth.[¹]

Whether called the Black Arts Center or the BVAC, the building is remarkable. The dedication was noted in the Buildings & Grounds blog of the Chronicle, and the first review of the building has appeared, in Hyperallergic. Unique photos of architectural models for the building are posted at Dartbeat. Donald Kreis has a perceptive review on Vermont Public Radio.

The accompanying plaza, built by specialized contractor Landshapes, is visible in a number of photos from the school’s Flickr photostream. There are also photos of the installation of Louise Joséphine Bourgeois’ giant metal spider sculpture in the plaza.

It is difficult to believe that Dartmouth was content to maintain a parking lot on this site for the last several decades:

The new arts plaza is one of those places that changes its site radically and yet seems inevitable.

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[Update 11.04.2012: Kreis review link added.]
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• Here in Hanover ran a profile of architect Randall Mudge in its Spring 2011 issue (pdf).
• David’s House at CHaD is adding a wing (Valley News).
• This unusual stucco house at 28 East Wheelock has a whiff of Larson about it; it is owned by the college (see Dartmouth Real Estate):
  
  

• A trailer for the upcoming Dartmouth ski documentary A Passion for Snow is available.
• A map art company is selling a print of a stylized map of the campus.
• Something big has happened to 8 Occom Ridge:

  The later aerial views from Google and Bing (below) appear to show a replacement:

• A Dartmouth shirt sold on eBay says “Go Green and White.” Hmmm.
• The Development Office has its own in-house PR firm, the Office of Development Communications.
• An article on archeology in Columbia, Connecticut explains that the first building of Moor’s Indian Charity School still stands, on a later foundation.
• Both the renovated Hanover High and the new Richmond Middle School have biomass plants. It is hard to imagine that any future Dartmouth heating plant would not rely at least in part on burning wood chips.
• The Dartmouth Planner reports that the Town of Hanover is beginning to rewrite its zoning ordinances.
• Last spring, van Zelm Heywood & Shadford helped renovate Burke Chemistry Laboratory (The Dartmouth).
• A recent photo of the roof of the expanded Hayward Room at the Inn, taken with the Class of 1966 Webcam:
  

From some angles, Haynes & Garthwaite‘s new Alpha Phi sorority house on North Park Street recalls the old Sigma Phi Epsilon house on Webster Avenue:

In other North Park news, The Dartmouth reports that the school is planning to create an LGBT house on the street. The Valley News writes:

Hanover — Dartmouth College will move forward with plans to open a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender student residence in 2014, a project that has been the longtime goal of a college advisor who has been working on the plan for more than a dozen years.

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[Update 11.04.2012: T-N photos link and VN quote added.]

The Dartmouth has an interesting report on sports medicine at the college. First, it is intriguing that the sports medicine staffers fall under the direction of Health Services rather than the Athletic Department. Second, the Athletic Department is looking to have a training building built:

The Athletic Department and Health Services are currently considering the possibility of creating larger training rooms where the sports medicine staff can work together, which may be realized within the next two years, Galbraith said. This would ideally involve not just an expansion of the current training rooms inside Davis Varsity House, but the construction of an entirely new facility near Scully-Fahey Field — creating two “hubs” for the sports medicine program, Turco said.

Wouldn’t this be a natural function to combine with the indoor practice facility? Is that why the Scully-Fahey area is proposed? If not, one good place to put the training rooms would be the site next to Davis Varsity House:

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[Update 09.08.2012: Even though the western (tennis court) site is right next to the gym, it is reserved by the 2002 master plan for academic uses because it is so close to the center of campus. That makes sense.]

The Dartmouth Organic Farm on Lyme Road is planning to demolish a 50-year-old barn on the property and replace it with a timber-framed building to serve as a Sustainability Center, according to The Dartmouth. The builder of the new building will be TimberHomes LLC of Vershire, Vermont, a firm established by DOC historian David Hooke.

• Dartmouth Now has a post on the 75th anniversary of the Appalachian Trail, and The Dartmouth has an article.
• The old through-truss bridge over the Connecticut at Lebanon is being replaced by the state highway department. The old and new bridges appear side-by-side in the Bing aerial.
• The Hood has a page on the installation of the Kelly sculpture.
• With little fanfare, the college/town-owned Hanover Water Company has been renamed the Trescott Water Company. Find some info at the Hanover Conservancy.
• A beer garden at the Hop? (Newhampshire.com).
• The owner of Jesse’s Restaurant on Route 120 is building a medical office building nearby (Valley News). Medical office buildings are popular: DHMC’s Heater Road Building had planning approval as private development when the hospital took over the project (DHMC has video about the architect and builder, several renderings, and other info).
• Baker Library’s Reserve Corridor, now known as the Orozco Room, is being refurbished.
• An old neighborhood in Hanover has developed what seems to be a new name, the West End. As far as one can tell from the web, this neighborhood occupies most of Hanover’s southwestern quarter, West of Main and south of Wheelock. The town is considering whether to designate the West End as a Heritage District (Planning Board minutes Jan. 24, 2012 pdf).
• The college built a new chilled water plant next to the VAC (Bond info pdf, A-9).
• Ore Koren ’12 created Dartmouth 1820s-1850s, an interesting collection documenting student life during the early nineteenth century.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Newhampshire.com removed; broken links to planning minutes and bond report fixed.]

The previous post on this topic mentioned that the current rendering (source) of the quad facade differs slightly from an earlier rendering published during May. Some of the changes:

• The eastern (most distant) of the three masses has gone from light-colored stone cladding to something more uniform, possibly metal, and has gained a glazed projection or Window of Appearance. The mass also appears to have taken on a stepped form where it meets the rest of the building.
• The central mass is still a glass box, but the detailing has changed. The third level seems to have been omitted or made into a mezzanine.
• The nearer, western mass has changed from red brick to stone or concrete. The walls of the ground level are largely blank, suggesting that this part of the building will house Dana Library.

Where will Dana go between the demolition of its current building in 2013 and the completion of the new one in 2016? It will occupy Homes 37 and 50, former Nursing School buildings that are now known, as a result of two of the school’s better E-911 naming decisions, as 37 and 50 Dewey Field Road.

The Biomedical Libraries Blog has a plan of the library in its temporary home, with the layout designed by ADD Inc.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to library plan replaced.]

[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to library blog fixed.]

[Update 08.19.2012: It looks as if the addresses of the buildings at 37 and 50 Dewey Field Road have been consolidated, and the building built in 1950 (i.e. Home 50) is now numbered 37 Dewey Field Road.]

We know about the recent go-ahead for the Williamson Translational Research Building at the south end of the DHMC complex (Skylight magazine Fall 2007 (pdf), Dartmed, Street View of site), but what about the already-begun Advanced Surgical Center and Clinical MRI addition at the north end?

Also a “translational research” facility, the MRI addition was designed by Payette Associates of Boston. Work apparently began during August of 2011 and is set to conclude during 2013. See the numerous impressive images at the firm’s page. An overview appears in Skylight (pdf) and a Lebanon planning document (pdf) shows how DHMC expanded the wing slightly during design to accommodate different equipment.

At Commencement the Board announced the construction of the Williamson Translational Research Building at the hospital (a project announced in 2007) and, more notably here, of a “North Campus Academic Center” (Dartmouth Now via Jon).

The Academic Center will contain classrooms, academic offices for DCHCDS and other programs, and the Dana Biomedical Library, an institution that currently occupies its own building. The Center might be made up of multiple buildings: “Dartmouth director of project management Matt Purcell says that the school … is developing two buildings for its new North Campus Academic Center” (Real Estate Bisnow Boston).

An overlooked document from a conference last month (pdf) includes a rendering of the buildings:

That brick building behind the new screen on the left is Remsen. Compare this view:

The buildings shown in the rendering occupy the sites of Gilman and Dana. Those buildings are not particularly popular, and their demolition would have been good to mention in the press release.

Acknowledging that the rendering probably does not represent a final design, what can be said about the project? It looks better than Gilman. The far block, with its stone (?) cladding, might be the library replacement. The less pretentious near block, of brick-red cast masonry units (?), is probably the classroom building. Between the two is a glazed tower. The sweeping concrete wall and bridge is a bit too Fairchild, but it should improve the circulation in the area and make the Medical School more porous and campuslike.

The rendering above was an interesting one to choose as the representative of this project: it is not the view from the street or from the center of campus. Instead, it looks to the northwest from around the center of the left edge of this aerial:

If Gilman is to go, the school should save the wonderful (Scotford-designed?) lettering from its entrance and the polite sculpture that is affixed to the east end of the building.

Townscape: The view from Sudikoff.

Even though Gilman long predates the McLaughlin Cluster, it provides a not-bad terminus for the Cluster’s main vista. The new academic centers building now has an opportunity to provide an intentional northern end to the axis. Without being heavy-handed or obvious, this building also could provide a gateway to the medical school — perhaps not Seussian gargoyles (a fertile field…) but some acknowledgment, such as a pedestrian passage or an inscribed granite lintel, that this is where one institution ends and another begins.

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[Update 07.07.2012: Townscape information and better comparison image added. The gold lettering visible in a photo from The Dartmouth is the salvage-worthy Gilman detail referred to above. It seems from the photo to be painted on the transom. If that panel is removed and is not installed in the replacement building, what happens to it? What happens to all the notable elements that surely are removed from demolished buildings? Until there is a Dartmouth Museum, they could be displayed in the studios at 4 Currier or the VAC. (Dartmouth could indeed build a museum to its own past and stock it with the realia now in the archives.)]

The 122,000-square foot North Campus Academic Center is scheduled to contain:

• 18 classrooms
• the Dana Biomedical Library
• interdisciplinary space for the Geisel School of Medicine; the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice; the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science; and the Department of Sociology

Sources: Dartmouth Now and Tradeline.]

[Update 08.12.2012: There is other lettering at the east end of Gilman as well.]