Dartmouth acquired the Sargent Block, which contains the Hanover Inn Motor Lodge (Brooke Fleck, 1960), and it plans to redevelop the entire block. As with the South Block, this means demolishing most of the buildings.

Although the Lodge has been used for the last twenty years or so as a dormitory, it will be closed during the 2006-2007 year. The very attractive new campus map featuring dormitories also omits the Lodge.

These seem to be the first public signs that the Lodge is about to go. It will be interesting to see what the school builds in its place and how closely it follows the Town’s bold vision for the block.

[Update 08.03.2006: text corrected]
[Update 08.09.2006: "Sargent" added]

Stefanos Polyzoides‘ perceptive essay “On Campus-Making in America,” which appeared in Moore Ruble Yudell: Campus & Community (Rockport, Ma.: Rockport Publishers, Inc., 1997), is available at his firm’s website.

The school seems not to have announced very loudly at the end of last month that the new Tuck Mall dorms will be named (from west to east) McLane Hall and Fahey Hall.

What happened to the old McLane Hall in the River Cluster? It has been renamed Judge Hall.

The three remaining dorms in the new McLaughlin Cluster will be named Thomas, Goldstein, and Rauner Halls (see map). Rauner will be the northernmost in the eastern trio, of which Bildner and Berry were named previously; Thomas and Goldstein Halls will be the northern and central buildings, respectively, in the western trio, of which Byrne II already has been named.

The Hanover Country Club would seem to be Dartmouth’s oldest athletic building, a nineteenth-century barn remodeled as an Arts & Crafts clubhouse by Homer Eaton Keyes in 1916. It is still in excellent shape and well used, although there has been talk for several years of replacing it, presumably with a clubhouse some distance from campus on Lyme Road.

(The school’s oldest intercollegiate athletic facility must be the Alumni Oval of 1893, which was remodeled as Memorial Field and is being remodeled again this summer — meaning that the site and the form have been replicated through the years but that none of the original materials survive.)

[Update 09.12.2006: clubhouse remodeling date corrected.]

The first perspective rendering of the Varsity House is available.

The building’s information page states that “[t]he facility is designed in a simple, contemporary style but highlights traditional Dartmouth elements with its brick exterior and white windows.” It may be a bit minimalist for the school’s taste.

The Athletic Department has photos of the field renovation.