Buildings – construction, some demolition

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.

Varied topics

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).

Tuck LLC buildings named

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.”)

Tuck LLC donors hinted at

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.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Board fixed.]

Tuck building plans updated

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.

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[Update 11.12.2012: Broken link removed.]

Tuck Living-Learning Center plans refined

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.

Business education history

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.]

View of future Tuck building available

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.

The construction boom

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.”

Hinman Hall demolition

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.]

Article on construction

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.

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[Update 11.10.2012: Broken link to news article replaced, broken links to Goody Clancy pages fixed.]