The Office of Planning, Design & Construction has revealed an unusual schedule of all the buildings and other construction projects to be completed on campus through October, 2010. This comes with a larger version of the master plan than has been available in the past. The documents state that:

-Bradley-Gerry demolition will end during September, 2007.

-The Life Sciences Building, which will stand east of Vail/Remsen, will be built starting early during 2007, with design starting soon. No architect seems to have been announced yet.

-Design for the dining hall to replace Thayer Hall will begin this summer. No architect has been announced for this project either, although Centerbrook was involved in the master planning for the student center area.

The latest McLaughlin photos show the buildings starting to look like a real place, with the view of the corner of Maynard and College now recognizable.

Architect Chris Grimley of Machado & Silvetti “is currently working on a consolidation of the arts programs at Dartmouth College into a single Visual Art Center.”

Although the universal acclaim for the firm’s $275 million renovation of the Getty Villa museum (New Yorker, New York Times) makes Dartmouth’s selection of the firm appear especially prescient, the best predictor of the appearance of the Lebanon Street building might be the firm’s University of Utah Museum of Fine Art.

Construction will start for the new building during the summer of 2008. Unfortunately, it will require the school to demolish the 1914 Clement Hall, Hanover’s best industrial building.

When Dartmouth started its current fundraising campaign in 2001, it expanded its small institutional news service into a full-fledged public relations team under the new office of the Vice President for Public Affairs. The creation of this office was by all accounts an overdue development. In the meantime, students took matters into their own hands by creating Buzzflood; the Tuck School has become a world center for the study of marketing; and alumni have discussed school “branding” (Class of 1963 newsletter).

The PR Office and currently has five members, as described in a profile in PR Week [pdf] and has hired the Manhattan PR firm of Plesser Holland. The firm is experienced in drafting materials and managing reputation but does not claim to be a design shop that focuses on creating logotypes and related images.

The most notable recent step of Dartmouth’s PR Office is the welcome issuance of the Dartmouth Editorial Style Guide during December of 2005 by its Office of Publications. The Guide sets standards for the use of Dartmouth’s Seal (1773, engr. Nathaniel Hurd), its Shield (1940, W.A. Dwiggins, modified 1957), and the lesser-used White Pine from its Bicentennial Flag (1969). The Shield is properly rendered in black and white; the Seal is properly reserved for official uses. The Guide also mentions an odd little Baker Tower sketch that might fit better in a clip art collection. (More information on the history of some of these designs may be found in the Library Bulletin.)

Dartmouth does not yet have a comprehensive set of “visual identity guidelines,” a set of standards that would cover the images mentioned above as well as lay out appropriate uses of an official typeface and coat of arms. Some schools developing clear and comprehensive guidelines that include all of these elements are Brown, Cornell, Cambridge.

A coat of arms is a heraldic device that would exist alongside the Seal and Shield, and it is something the College needs. The most recent proposal for a coat of arms features Dartmouth Hall (unlike the above devices, which feature hypothetical buildings) and includes the school’s motto as well as a buck’s head from the arms of the Second Earl of Dartmouth.

Dr. Good’s proposed arms, in black and white

Because a heraldic coat of arms is by nature an adaptable arrangement of colored elements on a field, this design would be suitable for a much wider range of applications than the Shield, which is exclusively a black-and-white line drawing.

Following are some indications that a coat of arms is needed:

This Shield uses colors other than black and white and incorporates an inappropriate drop shadow.

This shade of lavender (presumably derived from the face of Baker’s clocks) belongs in the palette, but this logotype makes the institutional subunit look more independent and important than the Tuck School.

The nonstandard logotype above diverges in size, font, arrangement, and color from the one the school should adopt; the Shield within it also is highly unorthodox. (Dr. Good also notes that it eliminates the Indians from Dartmouth’s Seal.)

This one uses an attractive but nonstandard version of the White Pine.

The point is not that the new guidelines, which would prevent most of the uses above, are being enforced insufficiently. The website of the Technology Transfer Office needs color in its graphic identification with Dartmouth. The point is that it is inappropriate to transform the Shield into some sort of color logo or coat of arms in graphic-design terms as well as heraldic ones, and that Dartmouth therefore needs a coat of arms, which may be rendered in color or black and white as well as abbreviated, with smaller elements standing for the whole.

The PR Office, as the manager of the school’s visual identity, is the proper body to request the official adoption of a coat of arms and to then specify its use in exactly these situations. The office is probably too busy at the moment, but if it ever commissions a set of visual identity guidelines from an outside firm, as the schools listed above have done, it should include a coat of arms in the specifications for the project. The variety of logotypes that Dartmouth needs (and already is trying to use) simply requires a coat of arms: a black-and-white line drawing from 1940, however traditional and useful in some situations, is far too limited for what Dartmouth requires.

[04.08.2006 altered slightly.]

The Office of Planning, Design & Construction has posted several photos of February work on the drill hall or upper gym of Alumni Gymnasium.

Compare this early-twentieth century view:

Construction on the new Varsity House started February 22, and detailed information on the latest addition to Dartmouth’s 113-year-old athletic park appeared on line last week.

The building has a project page that includes several November 2005 renderings that now depict the building in red brick, like the Gym, rather than in the green panels implied by the last rendering released.

This early design dated June 10, 2005 will not be built.

The Park Street facade, which will become the right field wall for Red Rolfe Field, is visible for the first time, and the site plan appears to indicate that Rolfe gets a new foul pole.

The third level plan indicates that it will contain mostly offices, with the prime spots overlooking the field held by a meeting room, a conference room, and a sort of lounge — a big room with comfortable chairs, not the row of skyboxes one might have expected.

Contrary to previous speculation here, the existing east stands will not be demolished, only partially disassembled and reinstalled to the south, in front of Leverone.

Dartmouth announced today that Bruce ‘78 and Diana Rauner and Jack ‘74 and Debbie Thomas will have two of the three dormitories in one of the trios of the McLaughlin cluster named for them.

That leaves one building without a name…

In the wake of Britain’s education fees controversy, The Guardian has seized on the similarities between the endowments and enrollments of Dartmouth and Oxford to compare Dartmouth favorably to the English institution.

Dartmouth’s stadium, tiny in Ivy terms, comes out as peculiarly impressive in the article because it has enough seats for everyone…

Somehow it is hard to picture American football as seen from an English football terrace (see an image of Arsenal’s new stadium in the UAE, proof that terraces are not a result of budget constraints; terrace stories; terrace songs and chants).

The author of the Guardian piece might be shocked to learn that “enrollment” in the U.S. means total students, not just the entering class. That means that the comparison is even less valid: Dartmouth is less than one-quarter the size of Oxford’s 17,000 “enrollment.” There are dormitory clusters at Dartmouth that are larger than Oxford colleges.

[Update 12.12.2006: Enrollment information added.]

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).

Randall T. Mudge’s design for the Rugby Clubhouse has won a state AIA merit award.

Vox confirms that the dining hall north of Maynard will be called the Class of 1953 Commons and is being designed by Moore Ruble Yudell.

The D, talking to Dean Redman, has put a date on the Thayer Dining Hall demolition: it will come down by 2010. The article states that the school has not selected an architect for the replacement.

One might offer a thumbnail preservation plan for the school to undertake before demolishing the building:

1. hire a Cultural Resource Management consultant to document the building to HABS standards. This is a widespread practice that has been conventional for decades in government;
2. remove and preserve the painted leather wallcoverings from the Tyndall Lounge, the Robert Burns painting The Dartmouth College Case (1962) from the main dining room, and the murals Eleazar Wheelock (1937-1939) by noted American illustrator Walter Beach Humphrey from the Hovey Grill. This is a chance to get the controversial murals out of an everyday setting and into a gallery or storage (although it might be used as a reason to demolish them — it probably depends on how they were created);
3. remove and preserve some notable architectural element, such as one of the roof trusses from the main dining hall. People have been suggesting for a hundred years that the school systematically collect architectural artifacts from the buildings it demolishes, and if there is no room for a permanent collection, some things from Thayer might at least go in the future dining hall.

A rendering of the new fitness center in the renovated drill hall of Alumni Gymnasium seems to show an elevator blocking much of the thermal window at that end of the building; perhaps there was no choice of where to put it, and on-center was better than off-center…

[03.18.2006 “Fitness center” substituted for “mezzanine” to clarify.]

The University of Virginia has selected Moore Ruble Yudell to design an important addition to the Thomas Jefferson/McKim, Mead & White Lawn. The U.Va. magazine cites the firm’s design for Dartmouth’s Kemeny Hall to reassure readers that the architects respond to traditional building forms.

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

Dartmouth has put up several pages about the art and architecture of Rollins Chapel.