Dartmo.

Rollins Chapel’s ca. 2004 renovation, the one that uncovered the windows, was designed by Theriault/Landmann Associates of Maine.

Architect Orliff Van Heik Chase of Shepley Rutan & Coolidge designed some work on the Delta Tau Delta house at Dartmouth according to William Collin Levere, Leading Greeks (1915). The basis for the work, perhaps an addition, appears to have been the fraternity’s 1874 house at 36 North Main (burned 1936). A 1915 view of the house hints at a “goat room” addition between the house and the barn. Another view appears in Barrett’s Hanover, N.H.. Chase was a 1908 Wesleyan graduate who designed houses for the fraternity at Wesleyan and Tufts as well.

Theta Delta Chi is naming its addition to the north for Marc Fragge ’87. Several photos of the construction are available, including one showing the site in relation to Thayer Dining Hall’s west end. A November rendering of the addition shows the flanking walls lowered to reveal more clapboarding.

David Williams ’79 of Davis Brody Bond Aedas is the architect of the Tri-Kap renovation, The Dartmouth notes.

Zeta Psi has its own construction photos on line. This house is seeing some of the most extensive interior alteration of any Fuller Audit project.

The Dartmouth recently depicted Chi Gamma Epsilon with a roofed steel fire stair at its east end that looks like an incomplete Fuller Audit addition, but it is hard to tell.

The Hill Winds Society is producing a book on school traditions with an organization called the Sphinx Foundation. The foundation is connected with the Sphinx Senior Society but not the College, as an editorial in The Dartmouth explains. It has Professor Emeritus Jere Daniell speak on different Dartmouth history topics now and then and sponsored his recent talk on the Wheelock Succession (article in The Dartmouth). The foundation apparently sends letters to incoming students.

The Dartmouth Outing Club Centennial is approaching at the beginning of 2009 and the club now has a page up with an ambitious schedule of activities.

Erik Anjou’s and Mark Bernstein’s documentary Eight: Ivy League Football and America has been released (The Dartmouth, Big Green Alert Blog). The official page suggests that the film shares with Bernstein’s book the shaky contention that the first intercollegiate football game was played in 1869. There was a “football” game played that year, but it was “football” in the English sense, what Americans now call soccer. The first college football game (ancestor of today’s American/gridiron football) was not played until 1874, when McGill’s rugby team played Harvard.

The post-Fuller Audit addition to Jens Larson’s Tri-Kap house is depicted in drawings now available in pdf. Smith & Vansant Architects designed the set of large, traditionally-detailed brick additions: a three-bay addition to the west, a one-bay addition to the east, replacing the original porch, and a covered porch on the front or south facade. Renderings of the expanded basement indicate that it can fit four pong tables.

Randall T. Mudge & Associates, Architects have created a firm website relatively recently. Familiar projects will include the Powerhouse Shopping Center in West Lebanon, David’s House at DHMC, and Dragon and the Rugby Clubhouse at Dartmouth.

The Fuller Audits conducted under the Student Life Initiative about ten years ago pointed out the building-code failings of each student society house. Almost every fraternity, sorority, or co-ed house needed an enclosed exterior fire stair and possibly an elevator. Since then, the College has altered or added onto the nine or so society houses it owns, one society has built itself a new house, and about sixteen other groups have been working independently to add to their own houses.

The variety of approaches is relatively small. Long brick buildings designed as fraternities usually get extended at one end, while frame houses closer to a square or a tee in plan are given a rear ell. Almost every addition is “contextual” and attempts to harmonize with the building to which it is attached. The two latest additions represent the extremes.

Theta Delta Chi is extending to the north its north-south oriented building adjacent Thayer Dining Hall using a design by the Portland, Maine firm of Arcadia Designworks. Arcadia’s outlook is broader than most — the firm also handles industrial design and apparently created an improved lobster trap — and its addition to Theta Delt is unusually “contemporary” in style.

The extension avoids both the brick construction and the roof form of the historic house designed by Putnam & Chandler of Boston. If Hanover had a Design Review Commission, as many cities these days do, it probably would not approve this addition.

Zeta Psi, on the other hand, has commissioned a firm intimately familiar with the work of Jens Larson (Smith & Vansant Architects of Norwich) to expand its house in several directions. Saucier & Flynn, the College’s landscape architects, are handling the landscape design. The conceptual drawings (pdf) include floorplans bearing a notation rarely seen in architecture, an indication of the designers’ familiarity with the client: “Pong tables shown for scale.” The alterations include an extension to the west end of the house and a new gable over the two-level portico at the rear. Hanover’s zoning authorities have approved the project (pdf).

In general construction news, Guy C. Denechaud writes that “Projects Are Plentiful at Dartmouth College,” Valley Business Journal (April 7, 2008).

The Valley News reports that the fieldhouse at Burnham, called the Sports Pavilion, is open as the clubhouse for the soccer and lacrosse teams. The school will add an athletic trainers’ facility to the north side of the building in the future.

Alpha Theta is also working on repairs to comply with the Fuller Audit.

The Dartmouth reports that Bartlett Hall is being rehabilitated.

New Hampshire Hall’s exterior was photographed prior to the expansions that is under way now.

Dartmouth’s design office updated its complete list of projects in December (pdf). Renovations of New Hampshire Hall and the Inn are in the works, along with the creation or upgrading of a multipurpose sports field.

Dartmouth has also bought and is renovating the neighboring houses at 25 and 27 South Park Street and plans to rent each one to a sorority. Alpha Xi Delta will move from Webster Avenue, where it has rented the Beta Theta Pi House, and Alpha Phi will occupy a house for the first time, The Dartmouth reports. Both have been identified as designs of Jens Larson.

This is the front (west) facade of number 25.

This is number 27. To the right at number 29 is Fire & Skoal, also a Larson design.

The houses screen Thompson Arena.

Architect Fred Wesley Wentworth of the Chandler class of 1887 is the subject of a well-illustrated new website by Richard Polton.

The Chronicle has a surprisingly-detailed story on a Sphinx plumbing project.

Some time ago a photo of Dartmouth Hall without shutters was posted here; it turns out that the school was putting up shutters made of composite materials produced by Atlantic Shutters. Atlantic mentions also redoing the shutters for Alpha Delta and three other houses.

In “Zeta Psi Rising,” Michael Edgar posited that the recent lack of maintenance of Jens Larson’s Zeta Psi house was so great that the cost of repairs and code compliance might make demolition and replacement cheaper. The source of this speculation is not clear.

The architect of the Phi Delta Theta (now Phi Delta Alpha) house on Webster Avenue has been elusive. Although Alexander Anderson McKenzie “built into this house his own integrity,” as a plaque inside states, he did not design the building.

The American Architect and Building News stated in its “Building Intelligence” section for November 10, 1900:

The Dartmouth College Chapter of Phi Delta Theta fraternity will erect a chapter-house on Webster Ave., after plans by Charles A. Rich, 24 Nassau St., N.Y. City. The structure will be built in the Colonial style prevailing in the college buildings, the lines in general being similar to those of the Gov. Hancock House, Boston.

The Harold Parmington Foundation, a fraternity that existed from 1972 to 1984 and had the most unusual fraternal symbol ever, lives on in a touching website that Dave Halpert has set up.

The site has several photos of the house (now owned by the College and occupied by Epsilon Kappa Theta) including photos of the meeting room, the basement and the pool room) as well as Carnival sculptures (for example, 1976) and composite photos (1976).

The firm that designed the new Phi Tau house turns out to be Weimann Lamphere Architects.

The Sphinx Tomb (William Butterfield, 1903) was listed on the National Register of Historic Places last March. It is the first building related to Dartmouth College or located in central Hanover to be listed. The only other building in Hanover Township to be listed so far is the Great Hollow Road Stone Arch Bridge over Mink Brook, which was listed in 1997.

Small updates:

• Fred Wilson‘s new reinterpretation of the Hood’s collection opened on October 1.
• The College has long considered serving beer in the future north campus dining hall.
• The Dartmouth notes that work on the Gym continues and should end by April.
• The Dartmouth notes that Chi Gamma Epsilon and Bones Gate have reopened after their
  building code renovations and additions.
• Dartmouth Life has a roundup of current construction projects.   The links at the bottom are
  to unique articles rather than the Facilities Planning Projects Page.
• The academic projects of Visual Arts Building architects Machado and Silvetti includes chiefly Princeton’s Scully Hall (1998) (more) and — more remarkably — a 1992 parking garage there.

A recent visit to the tower of Baker Library permitted views of the interior of the tower and, amid many other graffiti, a graffito from a member of Sphinx (general story in The Dartmouth).   The writing above the arches is illegible (“YLIJV?”), but the “M.K.K.” below presumably stands for “Mystical[al] Krewe of K____” (not Komus, surely?).