Dartmo.

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.

The Tuck School has released new details about its Living-Learning Center (“the Tuck LLC”), including plans and renderings showing it on the site of Hinman Hall in the River Cluster.

The east-facing outdoor space that the LLC creates will be known as the Class of 1980 Courtyard. On the west, a room known as the McLaughin Atrium will look through a broad, curving facade toward Vermont.

Writer Matthew Stewart responds to Tuck Dean Paul Danos’ letter in this month’s Atlantic by stating that “the Tuck School at Dartmouth was indeed founded first, as Paul Danos says; but Harvard was first to offer a master’s degree in business administration.”

This is a petty point, but it’s not clear how Stewart could be correct if he’s referring to the degree in lower-case letters: the Amos Tuck School of Administration and Finance was founded in 1900 and granted its first business master’s degree to Walter Blair and his two classmates in 1901. Harvard did not admit its first students until the fall of 1908.

No graduate degree in the administration of modern businesses existed in 1900. The Tuck School started by calling its degree the “Master of Science (Tuck School)” but renamed it during 1902 the “Master of Commercial Science,” a reference to the Bachelor of Commerce degree that many schools had been awarding for years. (Wayne Broehl, Tuck & Tucker (1999), 43-44.)

Harvard’s business school (which also might have begun by calling its degree the M.C.S.) did not seem to rename whatever graduate degree it was granting as a “Master of Business Administration” until 1921, and that’s the name that caught on. (Harvard probably did more than simply rename its existing degree — it probably invented a wholly-new curriculum that revolutionized business education; but Harvard did not open “the first graduate school in the country to offer a master’s degree in business” as Stewart stated in the original article last month.) In 1953, the Tuck School changed the name of the degree it had been awarding since 1901 to the conventional M.B.A.

[09.12.2006 update: reworded post, fixed typo.]

New plans for Tuck’s Living-Learning Center, to be built on the site of Hinman Hall, are available. For the first time, the basement-level plan confirms that this building, like all of the others in the Tuck School, will be accessible by tunnel.

The Tuck School’s website now has a rendering of the Living-Learning Complex designed by Goody Clancy to occupy the site of Hinman Hall, the River Cluster dormitory.

The building’s style appears to be a departure from that of the adjacent Whittemore Hall, also designed by Good Clancy; it will feature a small courtyard enclosed on two sides by colonnades, a new architectural form for the Tuck School.

In a speech to the faculty on October 31, President Wright announced: “I think we can confidently say that there has never been as much construction at any one time in our history.” Below is an excerpt from his speech as it relates to each future building project, with speculation about the architects added. In the context of architecture as a world art form, the most important project is the first listed here; the project that is most important to the school is listed second:

• “We are already in the planning stage for the visual arts center and will be continuing that process during the coming months.”
  –Designer: Machado & Silvetti

• “In the area of student life we are also in the final stages of planning a new dining hall north of campus, and a replacement dining hall at the current Thayer Dining site. The Class of 1953 has provided the funding for the north of Maynard Street facility, which will include space for graduate students. The dining projects will be staggered and will cause some disruption as we will need to complete the north of Maynard project before we begin at the Thayer site.”
  –Class of ’53 Dining Hall designer: presumably Moore Ruble Yudell
  –New Thayer Dining Hall designer: possibly Centerbrook

• “The Tuck School has plans for a living and learning center and they are moving forward with that aggressively. They already have most of the funding in place and are working on construction design, with the intent of starting construction during the second half of next year.”
  –Designer: Goody Clancy

• “The Medical School is moving ahead with their plans for a translational research building to be constructed near the hospital in Lebanon.”
  –Designer: possibly SBRA

• “The Grasse Road III project, currently before the town for approval, will provide more affordable housing than can be found in the local market.”
  –Designer: unknown, possibly William Rawn Associates

• “The life sciences building has been a challenge both in terms of fundraising and planning. Our original notion of a shared laboratory facility with the Medical School has evolved, and we are now thinking about a facility on the Hanover campus that will be primarily for the Biology Department, with only some classroom and meeting space for the Medical School. While this remains one of my very top priorities for fund raising, we are also looking at ways to use debt financing and internal resources to ensure that this project moves forward in a timely fashion.”
• “I have asked the Provost to review plans for renovation of the Dartmouth Row buildings and Carpenter Hall.”

The Valley News reports on the largest construction boom in recent memory, with $180 million in College and Town projects underway.

Hinman Hall is to be demolished according to a site plan (125k pdf) depicting future Tuck School expansion.   The school’s new “Living and Learning” facility, which will occupy the site of the northernmost River Cluster dormitory, also is described in the school’s capital campaign info.   The tentative footprint of the new building seems strangely friendly to the existing 1960s-style street layout and hostile to the Tuck School’s existing rectilinear armatures.

[Update 05.05.2005: Joe's Dartblog reports that the rumor is that demolition starts this summer.]

This month’s Dartmouth Life has an overview of the nine largest projects underway, with images of several of them.   Two that have received little press lately but seem to get the go-ahead here are the Visual Arts Center on Lebanon Street (Machado and Silvetti) and the Tuck School dormitory/classroom complex that sounds bigger than when first announced:

The facility will consist of three connected buildings: the east and west residential buildings, and the central classroom and learning bulding.

That facility will be connected to the existing Tuck complex and designed by the firm that designed Tuck’s most recent addition of Whittemore Hall [more], Goody Clancy.

The Facilities and Physical Infrastructure and Student Lifesections of the new strategic plan, “Dartmouth College: Forever New” include proposals for new buildings, including a Hopkins Center expansion and a Tuck School dormitory.

Reid Coggins ’04, student representative to a campus planning committee, notes several new ideas in discussion:

• Tentative plans to demolish Hinman (the River Cluster dormitory) and build a new Tuck School building in its place
• Longer-term plans to alter or even demolish the Choates
• Plans to add to Sudikoff to provide more space for Computer Science
• Plans by the Church of Christ for renovations that may improve the Berry-Maynard vista.