Dartmo.

The Class of 1953 Commons project, a renovation of Thayer Dining Hall (The Dartmouth, The Dartmouth), has finished.

Dartmouth Now has an article on the dedication with a flash (!?) slideshow of photos on Flickr. Bruner/Cott also has an image of the main dining room, and a first-floor plan appears on the DDS portion of the college website.

The building’s interior is hard to recognize. The photos show crisp white walls and sunlight replacing the cramped spaces and dim lighting of Thayer’s last renovation, which occurred in the 1980s. The main dining room, the site of Full Fare in the early 1990s and later Food Court, retains its original wooden roof trusses but abandons the painted flower ceiling panels. The south side dining room (Food Court of the early 1990s) is cool and sophisticated. The building now offers dining on the second floor, probably where the miniature convenience store called Topside once was, and perhaps where DDS offices once were.

Outside, the new stair is clad in granite. Irrespective of the changes in the menu, it looks like a nicer place to eat in.

Contrary to the implication on this site last month, the renovation and expansion of the Hanover Inn are indeed the work of Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc. The firm designed a stylish renovation of the Radisson Hotel in Manchester, N.H.

Interior design for the Inn is being handled by New York firm Bill Rooney Studio, Inc. Some snippets of the firm’s renderings show an interesting use of inscribed lines and geometric patterns.

The ongoing work has shifted some students’ Hinman Boxes, The Dartmouth reports.

Although the main block of the Inn is not even fifty years old, the Inn has been listed with the National Trust’s Historic Hotels of America. The Web information includes this novel tidbit:

Before Dartmouth College became co-ed, the fourth floor of the Hanover Inn was a single women’s dormitory. The Inn provided chaperones for the single female guests. The Hanover Inn is the oldest continuous business in the state of New Hampshire.

• The Real Estate Office’s new office building at 4 Currier, designed by Truex Cullins, was awarded a LEED Silver rating.
• College Photographer Joseph Mehling ’69 is retiring (The Dartmouth). Among hundreds of college-related projects, Mehling provided the photos for the Campus Guide.
• The Rauner Library Blog notes that the Freshman Book – the Shmenu – was last printed on paper in 2009.
• CRREL, the Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory north of campus, was giving tours recently (Valley News).
• Old fire insurance maps of American cities and towns produced by the Sanborn Map Company are invaluable to historians. A post at Bibliodyssey features the elaborate designs displayed on the title pages of Sanborn maps.
• According to hikers interviewed for an article in The Dartmouth, all of Hanover’s mile markers for the Appalachian Trail are inaccurate. Experience with the Milepost on a couple of drives up the Alcan suggests that the inaccuracies result from the practice of rerouting the trail.
• The watering trough that once occupied the southwest corner of the Green is featured in a post at the Review.
• The ongoing basketball office renovations in the Berry Sports Center are planned to include a “display of Dartmouth basketball history and tradition” (Valley News).
• The Dartmouth had an article back in May about how Rauner librarians hope that the players of new metadata games will help them attach information to untagged photos.
• Randall T. Mudge & Associates Architect has exterior and interior photos
  of the Dragon Senior Society hall. The interior paneling, taken from Dragon’s 1931 hall behind Baker, really does look like a Larson & Wells product.
• The site What Was There brings rephotography into the digital era by superimposing historic photos on Google Street View images.
• Yale’s new residential colleges site has a nice site map (pdf) showing existing colleges and site of the two new colleges designed by architecture school dean Robert A.M. Stern. The Grove Street Cemetery really is in the way…
• An article explains the move from the old hospital north of Maynard Street to the new DHMC complex in Lebanon 10 years ago.

The Alumni Magazine published two letters critical of a rendering of the proposed Inn addition. (It is not clear that the rendering represents a final design.)

One writer laments the lack of a railing for putting one’s feet upon, although the rendering shows clearly that the existing railing, located within the arcade that screens the recessed porch where the rocking chairs are, will be retained.

The same letter called the design “nontraditional,” and that might be accurate. The most prominent part of the addition will be a new porte-cochere, and the rendering seems to show it as a Modernist structure. But look at the Inn itself: it features an uncharacteristic mansard roof; a lack of shutters; the omission of traditional building details such as quoining, lintels, or sills; and the absence of columns or much reference to the Classical orders. The main block of the Inn was designed by Hilton architect William B. Tabler and completed in 1967.

The Friends of Hanover Crew project outline includes a site plan and textual overview with photos (pdf). The old dairy barn will be renovated for boat storage, placing this project in a long tradition of transforming agricultural buildings for boating purposes.

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.

In a preemptive move, the Town Arborist cut down the Parkhurst Elm on August 19
(Dartbeat blog post, Valley News blurb, Alumni Relations note).

The old tree (photo, info from College Arborist article in Parents News) was notable not only for its magnificence and prominence but for its siting, since its roots and trunk encroached on North Main Street:

The Rauner Blog has a post on the practice of saving pieces from an old tree.

Dartmouth’s and Memorial Field’s first night game under the new lights will begin at 6pm tonight against Penn.

The sports publicity office’s extraordinary promotional efforts, as chronicled by the Big Green Alert Blog, include a banner across Main Street, an advertising poster, and a drinks coaster distributed to local establishments.

A gallery of photos of ongoing construction projects for athletics includes a plan and rendering of the new varsity basketball offices in the Berry Sports Center. The design appears to be by Moser Pilon Nielson Architects of Wethersfield, Conn.

This familiar glassed-in space on the north side of Gwathmey Siegel‘s 1987 building faces East Wheelock Street and previously housed the Kresge Fitness Center. It is depicted in a Gwathmey Siegel photo and appears at the bottom of the small plan of the building published by the firm (pdf).

In December of 2008, Dartmouth put on hold its planned rebuilding of Memorial Field (Dartmouth News). The project would have demolished and replaced the existing steel-framed concrete grandstand, leaving the arcaded brick facade on Crosby Street. It seems that the replacement supports, made of concrete, were actually cast and have been resting in a field in Vermont, awaiting an improvement in the college budget.

Here’s hoping the project will be restarted soon.

The Big Green Alert Blog has been providing extensive coverage of the installation of lights at Memorial Field (June 11, June 25 morning and afternoon, August 3) in advance of the first night game on October 1. The game will be against Penn and will begin at the extravagantly late hour of 6 pm. It will be Dartmouth’s first-ever night game at any field.

[Update 08.22.2011: Replaced line reading "The project recently was restarted" (thanks Big Green Alert Blog).]

An article in The Dartmouth today credits Bruner Cott with the design of the ongoing Class of 1953 Commons renovation of Thayer Dining Hall.

The identity of the designer of this project has been the object of some curiosity. Initially, Bruner Cott designed a new dining hall to be called the Class of 1953 Commons (pdf) as part of the McLaughlin Cluster. Once food service was available at the north end of campus, the school would have been free to demolish the historic Thayer Dining Hall and replace it with a new dining facility by Kieran Timberlake (see planning document pdf).

The downturn and other factors caused Dartmouth to drop both dining halls and to settle for renovating Thayer, renaming it ’53 Commons. The answer to the question of which firm would get the job has not been answered publicly until recently. (Bruner Cott’s site also lists this project and has a rendering of the main dining room.)

The article is illustrated with a photo depicting nearly the view shown above.

Local architect Ammi Burnham Young (1798-1871) began designing federal custom houses in 1837 and was appointed Supervising Architect of the Treasury in 1852. His office designed federal buildings all over the country, from San Francisco to Cleveland to Galveston to Maine. Dartmouth awarded him an honorary degree in 1841.

Contrary to what was reported here in March, it looks as if Dartmouth is going to demolish the 1921 Parker Apartments at 2 North Park Street:

The July 6 minutes of the Zoning Board of Adjustment (pdf) state that the board granted an exemption “to allow for the demolition of an existing apartment building and construction of a new building to be used as a student residence.” Curiously, the minutes list no applicant; it was presumably Dartmouth.

The building appears to be serviceable, and one wonders why the college did not decide to renovate it. The faculty apartment next door is older and smaller, but its renovation worked out well:

Beta Theta Pi remedied the safety deficiencies uncovered in its Fuller Audit with a series of small porticos that make the building almost Propylaeic (above). Sigma Phi Epsilon decided to replace its house:

Dartmouth Now and print newsletters are publishing a rendering of the future Inn that shows a new porte-cochere, a modest expansion onto the Terrace, and, almost out of sight at the left, an expansion onto part of the Zahm Garden.

The rendering is by Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc., although it is not clear that the project will be undertaken by that firm.

The expansion could be very subtle and intriguing. It will put hotel rooms above the Gap on Main Street, in the existing upper level of the Lang Building. It will convert the Hopkins Center’s Strauss Gallery, at the northwest corner of the Hop, where the corridor makes a right-angle turn, into an entrance to the Inn (March 3, 2011 Building Code Advisory Committee minutes (pdf)).

[Update 07.17.2011: The Dartmouth reported Friday that the Inn has decided to close during construction, from December 2011 through April 12, 2012.]

Dartmouth’s Flickr stream has photos of the installation of furniture in Baker’s main hall.

The upcoming $12 million project at the Hanover Inn has a number of intriguing aspects. The first detailed story about it appeared in the Valley News last week, and the news has been picked up by the Boston Globe and WCAX. The Dartmouth Real Estate Office is running the project but appears to have dropped its “projects” webpage.

This is the kind of project that planners have been thinking about for decades. According to Alex Hanson’s story in the Valley News, builders will erect 12,000 square feet of additions between the Inn and the Hopkins Center and over a portion of the existing terrace facing Wheelock Street.

The terrace will shrink; the existing parking garage under the terrace will expand by ten spaces, presumably beneath the Zahm Garden/Drake Room portion of the expansion; the Inn’s existing restaurants will be pulled from the bowels of the building to storefronts on both Main and Wheelock Streets, an excellent idea; and the existing upper-level conference rooms will be divided into guest rooms.

This part of the project, explained in last week’s Valley News story, is particularly interesting:

The renovation would create guest rooms where now there are offices and meeting space in the Lang Building — the brick building next to the inn on Main Street that houses The Gap. The inn and Lang are already linked by passageways, but the new project requires the building to be brought up to code. Building code doesn’t allow openings between buildings on separate lots, and the financing of the two buildings makes it impossible to combine the lots, college officials wrote in filings with the town.

The Dartmouth reports on the progress of the works in Baker Library. Changes to the Catalogue Room or Main Hall itself appear to be minimal.

The new coffee shop is going into a room located behind and to the right (east) of the main desk, site of the short-lived News Center. A map (pdf) shows this room alongside the stacks.

Baker’s display cases, separated by pilasters, line one side of the wall depicted at the bottom of the drawing that accompanies the article in The Dartmouth.