Dartmo.

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 Ledyard “rebuild” (The Dartmouth) is going ahead, notes an article on an elaborate swim dock to be built upstream of the Friends of Dartmouth Rowing Boathouse.

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.]

Robert A.M. Stern Architects, designers of Moore Hall, are designing a renovation of the Catalogue Room or Main Hall in Baker Library, The Dartmouth reports (see prior post on the name for the project; a follow-up article in The Dartmouth).

The project will place comfortable seating in the long hall, which has been devoid of the ranks of wooden card catalog cabinets for several years. A coffee bar will be installed in the east end of the hall.

[Update 01.22.2011: Link to follow-up article 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.

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. That 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 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.

News notes on construction projects old and new:

• An anonymous donation has named the fitness center recently installed in the old gymnasium space at the top of Alumni Gym for former Trustee Charles Zimmerman ’23 Tu ’24 (The Dartmouth, Bloomberg).
• An article in the Valley News on Harris Trail at Hanover and the Class of 1966 Lodge.
• Health Facilities Management has named the DHMC complex an “icon” and the subject of one of its case studies. The SBRA announcement notes the hospital’s adoption of the shopping mall form.
• For an example of a remarkable and appropriate setting for a Beverly Pepper sculpture that shares some of the attributes of Thel, see the Weisslers’ amphitheater in New York (New York Times). See also the BLDGBLOG post on Buried Buildings.
• A building-related issue of The Mirror has some details on the Life Sciences Center.
• One hopes that the OPDC will get the chance to add a Class of 1953 Commons page to its list of projects.
• Another Titcomb Cabin update.

• Keep checking the Six South Street Hotel blog for construction photos.
• The New York Times had an article back in 2008 on the legal incentives to identifying “ancient roads” in Vermont. It brings to mind the observations of Christopher Lenney in Sightseeking: Clues to the Landscape History of New England (2005).
• The Hanover Conservation Council provides maps and other information on sites including Mink Brook and Fullington Farm, the latter in the news because it is the site of the boathouse of the Hanover High crew.
• The St. Gaudens National Historic Site in Cornish, just a few miles away from Hanover, has purchased Blow-Me-Down Farm (Valley News).
• Alumni Relations has a gallery of campus trees. Number 7 is the Parkhurst Elm.

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

Vermont Today states that the long-discussed hotel on South Street east of the Post Office parking lot is going ahead. Maine Course Hospitality Group is building it:

Detail of Maine Course website showing 6 South.

Construction will require the demolition of a building on the site.

Now that the Spaulding Auditorium loading docks have been reconfigured (see the Google Street View of the construction — Hanover is now available in Street View, by the way), the Visual Arts Center can go ahead as planned. William A. Berry & Son, Inc. is managing the construction. The architects’ project page has not returned yet.

Brewster Hall has been demolished, and Clement Hall will be torn down during the first week in February (The Dartmouth).

A Valley News article reports President Kim’s suggestion that Dartmouth host a national institute of the science of the delivery of health care. One imagines that it would accompany or expand upon the existing Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. That institute is scheduled to occupy the postponed future Koop Medical Science Complex at the south end of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (map).

If not located at the hospital, however, such an institute would make an excellent candidate for placement north of the medical school, even on the golf course. It would not require parking for patients; it would benefit from its proximity to downtown — walkable if not convenient enough for a student function — and yet it would be indisputably part of the college.

To allay the concerns expressed here last year, this building and any other buildings on the site should be made to follow the form of the town, not the campus. A grid of streets with sidewalks and buildings, rather than a network of curving driveways with lawns, would promote density while acknowledging that the college does not expect students to walk this far from the Green on a regular basis. The buildings would harmonize with the campus without pretending to be a part of it — much more South Block than McLaughlin Cluster.

The Institute for Security, Technology, and Society could move to the site, along with other administrative offices now at remote locations, such as the offices in the bank building on Main Street and the Development Office, which is in Centerra.

The perfect completion of such a plan would involve the Hanover Country Club House. The club has wanted a larger and more convenient clubhouse for several years. A new east-west connector street at the north end of this expansion project, crossing the south end of the golf course between Lyme Road to Rope Ferry Road, could provide an excellent site for such a building. The clubhouse would occupy the north side of this street, looking up the stretch of greensward; the south side of the street would be a densely-built wall representing the end of the urban development of Hanover. Compare the fascinating conditions of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

In Hanover, the clubhouse would stand on the north side of the northern cross-street, whichever was built:

Example of town-form development

[Update 02.06.2010: Map added.]

[Update 09.25.2010: With all this talk of buildings, it never occurred to me that the Dartmouth Center for Health Care Delivery Science would be mostly on-line.]

The Valley News has a story on an 1840s organ that ended up in a Wilder church (1890) and is now being restored. Wilder’s Congregational church (presuming that is the building) originally had very close ties to Dartmouth and Charles Wilder, donor of the funds for Wilder Hall.

The President’s House renovation is being “paid for by donors who want to take the cost — for which the college has received some criticism — out of the budget, and off the list of items raised whenever spending cuts are mentioned” according to the Valley News. The Dartmouth also has the story.

The Dartmouth noted that the frame of the Life Sciences building was topped out in mid-December.

The early-2000s “decompression” of dormitory rooms has begun to seem a bit luxurious. The college might increase income by expanding the entering class by about 50 students (The Dartmouth), a move that might require turning some doubles back into triples and so on.

Tuck Today has two glossy features related to its new buildings: Jeff Moag, “Dedicated to the Future,” and Christopher Percy Collier, “What Lies Beneath.” The architects (Goody Clancy) have photos of the buildings.

Collier’s article “It Takes a Village” in Tuck Today is about Sachem Village, the grad/professional student housing site in Lebanon. It mentions the predecessor of Wigwam Circle, the postwar temporary housing group behind Thayer School. It is also worth noting that Dartmouth built another group of similar portable buildings for married students next to the high school, called Sachem Village.

Daniel Stewart Fraser of Dan & Whit’s in Norwich (“If we don’t have it, you don’t need it”) has died at 96. The Valley News has a story.

Bevy King in West Leb is expanding (Valley News).

The college finished the renovations of two old buildings for sororities (The Dartmouth), is still planning to go ahead with a small number of other projects (The Dartmouth) including the Visual Arts Center (The Dartmouth).

The latest Capital Projects Schedule [pdf] has construction starting early next spring and finishing in September of 2012. The architects have not reinstated their initial page for the project.

Hanover’s elms always make an interesting topic (Valley News).

Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream provides some unusual views, including a shot of the Borwell Research Building entrance, the recently remade memorial garden by the Hop, and the Dartmouth Cup, which was made in 1848 by the Crown Jeweler.

The tech incubator in Centerra, the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center, plans to expand using state and federal grants (Valley News; The Dartmouth).

Rivercrest plans have been moved back, and Dartmouth hopes to put modular houses on the site (Valley News).

The Life Sciences project page has some new information, but the best gauge of progress is the webcam. The building is beginning to take shape. This is a very long project that will not end until August 2011 (Capital Projects Schedule [pdf]).

Plans for a “boutique” hotel below the Post Office have been uncertain, but Guy Denechaud reports in the Valley Business Journal that the Hotel Hanover is going ahead under the Maine Course Hospitality Group (press release [pdf]).