Dartmo.

• A nice reproduction of the famous photo of the burning of Dartmouth Hall is on line. This view to the southwest shows the rear of Dartmouth Hall, not the front. The photo seems to have been taken a moment after a large explosion — a smoke column is blasted horizontally from the northeast corner of the building at the second-floor level. Many of the students nearby are sprinting away, and some are turning to look back at the building.

• The Band is getting rid of its old style of uniform, a green wool blazer over a white turtleneck, white pants, and white tennis shoes. That combination seems to have lasted about 45 years.

• In August, the Planning Board talked in hypothetical terms of several potential development projects on Lyme Road, such as a tennis club north of the Chieftain (pdf), a golf course and country club around the junction of Lyme Road and Old Lyme Road (pdf), and others (pdf).

• The official traditions page is irritating not just because of the punctuation, the capitalization of “the HOP,” or the use of sentences like “It’s far different than [sic] you’re imagining.” Nor is it because of the claim that Homecoming was established in 1884, when Dartmouth Night didn’t even exist with or without a bonfire until 1895. No, it’s the statement that the school’s chartered mission is “… education of Indian youth … and also to educate English and others.” The Charter contains the true mission, which is “the education & instruction of Youth of the Indian Tribes … and also of English Youth and any others.”

• An early-1960s photo of the Hop excavation looking southwest from around Wilson Hall.

• Ask Dartmouth has put up some interesting posts lately, covering the Lone Pine, with a super photo of College Hill probably taken from the steeple of the College Church; the Hinman Mail Center (what it doesn’t say is that the student mailboxes are called Hinman Boxes, and until the mid-1990s the USPS tolerated the use of HB numbers in mailing addresses); the pendulum in Fairchild; and Sanborn Tea, still 10 cents a cup.

• Rauner Library’s blog has too many interesting posts to keep up with. See, for example, the post on the color Dartmouth Green.

• The Hanover Improvement Society has a smaller membership and larger ambition than one might expect.

• The New Hampshire Good Roads Association of 1904 is a remarkable survivor from the pre-auto era, when bicyclists were the interest group demanding that the highways be smooth.

• The bus stop study (pdf) recommends the removal of the curb cuts at Hanover Park (Google Street View). Bravo. That building would be so much more inviting if it did not pretend to have its own driveway.

• Dartmouth and the Mac: The Valley News article about Apple products in Hanover doesn’t focus on Dartmouth’s long-time maintenance of a Mac-centric campus. The college turned its Mac expectation into a requirement for all entering students in 1991. That seems fairly early until one reads about Drexel selecting Apple in 1983 and requiring Macs as soon as they appeared in 1984 (Drexel’s Steve Jobs memorial events).

• The unpaved paths on Whittemore Green should be applauded (Street View).

• The lively Congregational Church building in Wilder (Olcott), Vermont was designed in 1889 by Edward Goss. Following a renovation, it has become the Charles T. Wilder Center (U.K. Architects, Trumbull-Nelson, Lyme Properties). Charles Wilder was a mill owner who also gave buildings to Wellesley and Dartmouth.

• The Center for Cartoon Studies in WRJ is moving into a new headquarters (Valley News). The Center’s students occasionally create or display works at Dartmouth.

• National Geographic Traveler ranks the Dartmouth Winter Carnival sixth among world carnivals. That is pretty good, considering. The number one carnival is Anchorage’s Fur Rendezvous. (My high school band was scheduled to play the Rondy parade but pulled out when cold weather was forecast. Why not just wear warm clothing? Because this was the one time in three years when we could wear our official uniforms. Why not just play out the windows of a bus? Because the last time the band had tried that, spectators had pelted the bus with snowballs all the way down Fourth Avenue: if they were going to stand around and watch a parade when it was 20 below, the least the band could do was actually march.)

• Women’s Hockey won at Fenway (!) recently (Valley News). Fenway’s paint color was described as “Dartmouth Green” in 1934, and that color seems to have been used when the Green Monster was first painted in 1947. The shade used on the Green Monster does seem to have been lightened since.

• Dartmouth Now has a piece on “cabinhopping.”

• New notice of old projects: Centerbrook’s Wilder Lab addition; Lavallee/Brensinger’s Red Rolfe Field and DHMC Patient Training & Safety Center remodeling, and Red Rolfe Field; and Truex Cullins’s Buchanan Hall alterations.

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.]

Rauner Library has provided a remarkable photo of the Butterfield Museum embraced in a death-hug by Baker Library. This is a view of the south and east facades of the east wing of Baker, looking to the northwest. The problem of Butterfield appears to have had a significant influence on the design of Baker.

See also the photos of the bells and the steel frame of the tower under construction.

With historic Clement Hall demolished (film and photos), the Visual Arts Center construction has been put out for bid.

Phi Delt reconstruction continues, The Dartmouth reports.

Engleberth Construction provides photos of the Tuck Living-Learning Center (Achtmeyer, Raether, and Pineau-Valencienne Halls).

It is not new, but Forever New: A 10-Year Report provides a comprehensive photo of the interior-block facades of Kemeny-Haldeman not available elsewhere.

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 Tuck School’s Whittemore Hall, which houses executives in the summer, has been compared to a hotel, but it acts as a dormitory most of the time. Buchanan Hall after the Truex Cullins renovation really does seem to be essentially a year-round hotel for executive education students. There is even a front desk. The firm has taken the building’s original (semi-budget?) modernism and polished it.

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 Dartmouth reported that the New Hampshire Hall project is ending.

The Buchanan renovation is going ahead. For a short time, the project page seems to have included a rendering of the glassed-in hyphen that will connect Buchanan to Woodbury House.

In town, the Valley News notes that the foundering hotel proposed for the corner below the Post Office might be taken up by a new developer.

More photos of the Tuck Living and Learning Complex are available. The flanking elements of the three-building complex will be named, from west to east, Achtmeyer Hall and Pineau-Valencienne Hall. The connector portion, with its dining and lecture halls, will be named Raether Hall. (The front facade image available for some time now indicated the names of Achtmeyer, Raether, and “Donor.”)

Buchanan Hall, the shy Modernist Tuck School building on Tuck Mall, will be renovated by Fleck & Lewis Architects, the OPDC has announced. The building started as a student dormitory but now will be converted into a center for Executive Education. The upper levels of the four-level building will contain housing, while faculty and administrative offices and lounges for executives will occupy the ground level.

[02.03.2008 correction: the four- (not three-) level building was not converted to offices with the completion of Whittemore.]

The flat-arched roof on the Tuck Living-Learning Complex is interesting. The project page has recent photos, and the webcam has the latest.

The Tuck School is building a Living and Learning Complex west of Whittemore Hall. The H-shaped building comprises eastern and western residential wings joined by a full-height connector.

A front elevation that has been available for some time indicates that the western wing will be named Achtmeyer and the connector will be named Raether. In the image, the eastern wing is still named “Donor.”

Possible namesakes: William F. Achtmeyer is the Chairman of the Board of Overseers of the Tuck School and created the William F. Achtmeyer Center for Global Leadership in 2000. Paul E. Raether is a member of the Board of Overseers and has given the Paul Raether Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence.

Joining the camera facing the Tuck Living and Learning Complex construction site is a new camera atop Dana trained on the ’78 Life Sciences Center.

A blog by Bats provides an early photo of Tuck Mall showing the new landscape work. Unusually, the photo is taken from the roof of Murdough instead of from Baker Tower.

As the irregular grassy plot in front of the River Cluster becomes better defined and and is transformed into a front door to the Tuck School (through the school’s Whittemore Hall), the space needs a name.

Landscape architects Saucier & Flynn have mentioned “Whittemore Green” in town planning meetings (pdf).

Nearly-live views of the construction of the Tuck School’s Living-Learning Center available.

The Tuck School’s website includes a panoramic view of the PepsiCo Dining Room in Byrne Hall.

The updated footprint of the LLC appears about the same as in the first version released, but some interior changes are visible. The basement-level plan appears to have abandoned a rear entrance off the steep slope leading down to the river, for example. Front and rear elevations are available for the first time.

Dartmouth is demolishing an entire purpose-built masonry dormitory for what appears to be the first time in the school’s history; photos of the demolition of Hinman Hall, in the River Cluster, are surprisingly similar to photos of the construction of the building. Hinman is making way for the Tuck School’s Living-Learning Center.