Dartmo.

As a rough parallel to the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine article on alumni architects (a post here), Thayer School’s Dartmouth Engineer magazine has an article in which eight alumni designers speak about design.

The focus of this particular article is product design rather than building design. Thayer School, incidentally, was founded as the Thayer School of Architecture and Civil Engineering (see the 1868 Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Education) but has always focused on the engineering part of its mandate. The school dropped the word “architecture” from its name early on.

Professor Pease’s book about Dr. Seuss, Theodor SEUSS Geisel, is getting a lot of press (Valley News, The Dartmouth).

The Dartmouth has a story on Eli Burakian 2000 and the publication of his book of photographs, Moosilauke: Portrait of a Mountain.

Lots more on the mountain is available at MtMoosilauke.com.

• 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.

The May/June 2010 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine focuses on architecture and includes “Alumni Opinion: Return of the Critic” by William Morgan and “Architectural Digest” by C.J. Hughes. The latter article profiles alumni architects and makes the case for the quality of Dartmouth’s architectural education. I would like to read a history of that education some time, going back through instructors Banwell and the Hunters to Larson and Keyes and eventually, in the 1850s, to the Chandler School.

The Chandler School, on the vacant lot south of Blunt. The top floor of the rear addition was a skylit drafting studio. The building was expanded twice by alumni architects, both of whom had studied architecture inside. The frame building at left is Hubbard Hall, a temporary dormitory.

[Update 06.15.2010: The DAM article is up.]

This has probably been mentioned here before: “Dartmouth by Air,” a video by the Media Production Group, is worth watching.

The red jeep visible alongside the Green in this postcard appears in a 1954 film. Bill Miles '56 notes in the comments that he played Freddy and that Bob Black '56 played Eddy in the film. The Alpha Delta house stands in for a dormitory in the serenade scene.

Rauner’s blog has several photos of skijoring at Carnival.

Transcripts of President Hopkins’s oral-history interviews from 1958 to 1964 are now available (see also Rauner blog).

Steve Waterhouse '65 has written A Passion for Skiing about Dartmouth’s contribution to the skiing industry (Vail Today).

In Avatar (2009), colonist Jake is surprised to learn that some of the native Na’vi speak English. He asks and is told that they learned English at Dr. Augustine’s School. This exchange mirrors one in The Last of the Mohicans (1992) in which Cora asks Hawkeye how he learned to speak English, and he replies:

My father sent Uncas & I to Reverend Wheelock’s school when I was ten.

(From the Michael Mann and Christopher Crowe script, not in Cooper’s original — although Susan F. Cooper discusses Wheelock in her introduction to later editions such as the 1876 edition.)

The US News article on college Olympians (see also USA Today and Dartmouth’s recap) notes that Dartmouth’s is the first collegiate ski team. Another significant tradition is the the ski team’s organizational existence outside of the athletic department. The team is part of the outing club instead, following a 19th-century way of running things.

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine, now on line with archives back to July 2008, has issues featuring the DOC Centennial (see also the Congressional recognition) and the Olympics.

Dartmouth Life has an article on Carnival posters that mentions Winter Carnival: A Century of Dartmouth Posters (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, forthcoming fall 2010).

Hanover engineer and architect Edgar H. Hunter, a 1901 graduate, designed promotional posters for the state’s ski industry, including one from 1935 pictured in E. John B. Allen’s New Hampshire on Skis (Arcadia, 2002), 2. His son Ted Hunter ’38 was an Olympic skier and also an architect.

The Dartmouth printed a short series of articles on college properties outside of town, including Grant, the Organic Farm, Morton Farm, and most notably the Minary Center. More on the equestrian team.

This looks interesting: Professor Colin Calloway’s The Indian History of an American Institution: Native Americans and Dartmouth (Dartmouth College Press, 2010).

(Curiously, the Press still uses Scotford’s short-lived 1960s shield rather than the standard MacDonald version of 1944/1957.)

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

Rauner’s blog describes a fantastic horizontal-scrolling map of the Connecticut River at Hanover (image). It was created by Robert Fletcher around the turn of the twentieth century and was found among some records of the Hanover Water Works Co. that the library received recently. The shallow box containing the map is portable, and the map contains a number of notes on related facts.

This map could be scanned, stitched together, overlaid with a current aerial, and made into a fascinating website. A lot of the landmarks noted by Fletcher have probably been under several feet of water since Wilder Dam raised the river in the 1950s; yet the River was not pristine in Fletcher’s time, and he notes that the low-water level at Ledyard Bridge was raised by six feet by the dam at Olcott Falls (Wilder).

A UNH news story notes that one of the large and notable relief maps of the state created by Dartmouth’s Professor Hitchcock in the late 1870s is being restored. This particular map came to UNH in 1894, so it is probably not the one depicted on the east wall of the Butterfield Museum after that building opened in 1899.

The college radio station turned 50 in 2008 and has a photographic history on line. One of the photos from the 1990s shows Brett Haber, now the sports director for the CBS station in Washington, D.C. Brett, this is as good a time as any to apologize for throwing out your ski boots while cleaning the attic of Sigma Nu in 1992.

A nice trailer for the film project Monadnock: The Mountain That Stands Alone.

Why so many Ledyard books recently?

• Bill Gifford, Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer (2007).
  
• Edward G. Gray, The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler (Yale University Press, 2007).
• James Zug, American Traveler: The Life and Adventures of John Ledyard, the Man Who Dreamed of Walking the World (Basic Books, 2005).
• See also James Zug, ed., Last Voyage of Captain Cook: The Collected Writings of John Ledyard (National Geographic Adventure Classics, 2005).

A review I haven’t read in JAH compares them.

While the Office for Metropolitan History has — fabulously — made Manhattan new building application information available through a database covering the years from 1900 to 1986, the nineteenth century permits represent a larger project that is yet to be undertaken.

It turns out that the Internet Archive is hosting scanned and searchable copies of the Real Estate Record and Builders’ Guide from 1879 to 1922, each reporting new buildings, alterations, purchases, mortgages, and other transactions in detail. Searching for this journal returns a list of volumes available in pdf and other formats. The one unnumbered volume is 73 (1904), and volumes 26, 28, 30, 38, and 46 appear to be unavailable. Of those, volume 28 (second half of 1881) is available from Google Books.

Google Books also has volumes 5-6 (1870), 7-8 (1871), and 9-10 (1872).

A new list of about 675 Lamb & Rich projects should be available here in the next few weeks.

[Update 12.07.2009: It is more like 600 projects, and it is available at Lamb & Rich.]

[Update 02.14.2010: Reference to volumes 5-10 added.]

[Update 04.12.2010: Another good way to search the Record & Guide is to put this into Google:
site:www.columbia.edu "firm name".]

The Northeast Chapter of the Society for the Preservation of Old Mills has acquired some old textile machinery and hopes to restart a mill in Claremont (Valley News).

The short-term Memorial Field renovation is finishing and football has started (Valley News, Big Green Alert Blog).

Computers can compile multiple photographs of a single building into a three-dimensional model of that building; a lab at the University of Washington is using the millions of photos people have posted to Flickr to reconstruct entire cities (story at physorg.com). The lab has examples of several European monuments.

[Update 04.12.2010: The New York Times has a story on the "Rome in a Day" project that mentions the PhotoCity game.]

The Tuck School has started a Leadership Center (news release), and the Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (“the Dartmouth Institute”) is now being cited alongside Tuck, Thayer, and DMS as a graduate or research institution (Irene M. Wielawski, “Taking Charge,” Dartmouth Alumni Magazine (Sept./Oct. 2009), reprinted at Speaking of Dartmouth). The Dartmouth Institute was founded in 1988 and began its first degree-granting program in 2003.

The planning office has posted a presentation on parking [pdf], more interesting than you’d expect, and the College Planner has noted that Dartmouth has maintained parking rates for a quarter-century.

An aerial film made for promotional purposes shows the campus nicely.

An oral history of Dartmouth in World War II is available from the archives.

UPNE has published The Great River about the Connecticut River (UPNE, Valley News).

A photograph from this website showing Yale’s Book & Snake temple is the frontispiece in Stephen White’s new novel The Siege, set at Yale University.