Dartmo.

I. The Dartmouth Company

Curiously, there is a Boston-based real estate company called The Dartmouth Company. It makes good use of serifs and a dark green color on its website and seems to operate in New Hampshire. See also the more obvious reference to the college at the Dartmouth Education Foundation.

II. The Arms of Dartmouth’s Schools

The Dartmouth College website seems to be doing something new when it describes the institution as a collection of five apparently equal schools:

The harmonization and use of the schools’ shields is commendable.

But this arrangement seems to contradict the rule that Dartmouth is the college. The “Associated Schools” — Tuck, Thayer, Medical, and lately the graduate programs — are associated with the college but are not coequals beneath a central university administration. Because “Dartmouth” is the undergraduate college, there is no need to put the letters “CA&S” before one’s class year, for example.

Tom Owen writes in The Dartmouth today:

In the discussion following Kim’s address, Provost Carol Folt said there is a “complicated set of reasons” for the gap between Dartmouth’s national and international rankings. Two of the major contributing factors are Dartmouth’s lack of a “university” title and Dartmouth’s focus on undergraduates, both of which have hurt Dartmouth’s international reputation.

[...]

Although large-scale changes may be necessary in the next decade, alumni must see new developments as part of an institutional history of adaptation rather than as a threat to tradition, Kim said.

The school’s Quartomillennium celebration in 2019 would be a good time to launch something new.

[01.25.2012 update: Education Foundation link added.]

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.

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).