Dartmo.

The campus urban space north of Berry Library does not seem to have an official name yet. Although it is smaller and less formally designed than the Green or Tuck Mall, it is analogous to those two spaces in the way it extends from Baker Library, and Dartmouth is about to give its landscape an ambitious redesign by Richard Burck Associates. The space needs an official name.

Here’s hoping it gets called Berry Row, a name that several people have suggested already.* The name is conservative, and it makes sense: the three buildings that will line the west side of the space (Kemeny Hall, some future building, and Moore Hall) are analogous to the three-part Dartmouth Row and its progeny, Fayerweather Row and Massachusetts Row. Each of those rows creates a public space in front of it that may also be known by the name of the row.

Particular sites within the space still may have their own names, such as the proposed Alumni Plaza (pdf).

• [William D. Brawley?], Interface 29:2 (Winter 1998), 10 (pdf).
• Alex Shartsis, “New Math Building Will Honor Kemeny,” The Dartmouth (22 July 1998).
• William D. Brawley, “For Some People, It’s Becoming Increasingly Difficult to Tell Where Traditional Libraries Stop and Traditional Computing Services Begin,” Dartmouth College Library Bulletin (November 1998).

A closer look at Burnham Field shows that it really involves two independent parts:

1. Burnham Field (plan), with a grandstand and earth berms around it for seating (not shown in the pre-design concept).
   The architects, Freeman French Freeman, renovated the 1920s baseball and soccer grandstand at UVM’s Centennial Field.

2. A Fieldhouse (plan; west elevation, with Scully-Fahey grandstand in background; aerial perspective from northwest above the soccer field). The Fieldhouse will present its higher principal facade, toward the Blackman Fields — not toward either nearby grandstand. This facade situates the entrances to the building’s two locker rooms beneath a porch or an awning.

Trumbull-Nelson’s Constructive Images (Fall 2006 describes additions to Sachem Village and the renovation of Gilman Hall.

The Dartmouth Skiway is 50 years old. Skiway history articles appear in Dartmouth Life and elsewhere.

The Hood calendar notes that Jorge Silvetti will speak on architectural theory and recent projects at 5:30 on February 7 in Loew’s. His firm, Machado & Silvetti, is designing a building for the visual arts that will stand behind the Hood Museum and contain a new Loew Auditorium.

The biggest news in the flood of recent announcements involves the Life Sciences Building. This undergraduate lab has been in the works for several years; it has always been clear that it must be near Gilman (the existing undergrad lab) and the adjacent Medical School, but the degree to which it would be shared by (or might even replace) parts of the Medical School has fluctuated.

The school has just announced that the building will not stand near Gilman on the site of the Modular Lab (1980s, “The Pizza Hut Building”) but will occupy the site of Strasenburgh Hall (originally a dormitory, designed by Campbell, Aldrich & Nulty, 1962-1963) and Butler Hall (the utilitarian bulding down the hill, 1964), and that the Modular Lab will still be done away with to expand the Medical School’s existing lawn.

The designer of the nearly-$100 million building is Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, a firm that participated in the North Campus competition and has designed some of the most visible (and coolly, impossibly minimalist) Modernist architecture of the early twenty-first century: the Apple Stores of Tokyo (another image), Manhattan, and elsewhere.

The site plan indicates that the Life Sciences Building will not only stand near the Medical School, it will form an essential part of its campus. The Medical School’s ongoing half-departure from Hanover in favor of its suburban Lebanon campus and its decision not to claim a part of the Life Sciences Lab as originally proposed (now “the supporting systems will not need to accommodate the demands of other research sciences”) hint at a continuing Dartmouth takeover of the D.M.S. campus.

The Kemeny/Haldeman project page notes that the patterns in the building’s decorative brick display a Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, etc.). The pattern comprises a field of soldier-course bricks from which certain bricks protrude.

The Math Department’s previous headquarters, Bradley Hall (connected to Gerry Hall as the “Shower Towers”), was known to display some pattern in the arrangement of its blue, green, and white tiles, although what it represented did not seem to be commonly known.

[Update 12.31.2006: information on pattern added.]

The Class of ’53 Commons project page is up, providing plans and elevation drawings for Dartmouth’s second major dining hall. The building will stand behind Dick’s House and feature a south-facing colonnade behind a lawn (see perspective rendering).

What appears to be the new headquarters of the Office of Residential Life will occupy the ’53 Commons as well (see second-level plan).

Plans for Burnham Field, the soccer field south of Thompson Arena, are available on the project’s web page. The architects Freeman French Freeman have designed a roofed pavilion (image) to provide Burnham and Scully-Fahey with restrooms and possibly other functions.

The creation of Berry Row as a campus space is making progress as the landscaping for Kemeny/Haldeman, designed by Richard Burck Associates, gets underway.

Atkin Olshin Lawson-Bell is designing an extensive renovation of Hitchcock Hall, announced on the OPDC project page. The work will involve the demolition of all interior partitions (not the fireplaces), Charles Rich’s original shed-roofed (?) “resort room” in the crook of the ell, and the room’s early-1980s one-level flat-roofed expansion by Charles Hilgenhurst & Associates.

In the crook, on the original resort room footprint, will go a full-height enclosed fire stair in the same white-sided vocabulary as the interstitial elements of the firm’s Fahey and McLane Halls, across the Mall. The building will also gain a west entrance with a portico.

[01.24.2007 link to fireplace note, other details added.]

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.

Bradley-Gerry demolition is underway. The granite cladding will be reused in other projects.

One particularly appealing photo from the photo page shows the buildings’ memorable old Modernist chairs with their built-in writing surfaces.

A new group called the Hill Winds Society appears to combine the one-time functions of the Admissions Office (giving tours) and Palaeopitus (preserving traditions). The group trains its members to give special tradition-based tours of campus. (See the Alumni Relations announcement, the story in The Dartmouth, and a mention in a press release).

One really hates to be a bugbear about this, but the announcement might have been worded differently:

From the Green, the site of the Dartmouth Night bonfire since 1891 1901 [or the 1940s] and, before then, funeral pyres for sophomores’ math books, all paths lead to tradition: to 105 Dartmouth Hall, where the Great Issues lectures enthralled students in the mid-twentieth century; to Sanborn Library and its daily high tea; to Occum Occom Pond, where the “polar bears” swim have swum for the last few years; to Parkhurst, where today’s students shake the hand of President James Wright ’64a during the fall matriculation ceremony; and, of course, to Observatory Hill, where the triumvirate biumverate of tradition—the Bartlett Tower, the Robert Frost statue, and the Old Pine stump—reigns over the campus.

[...]

One of the few pines not felled in 1769, when the College founders razed the woods in the area to build Dartmouth Hall during the nineteenth century, the Old Pine long stood the test of time on the rocky hill now named Observatory Hill.

Here’s hoping the group is a success.

Plans for the Floren Varsity House from May and July, 2006 are available at the athletics website, postdating the November 2005 plans available on the project page. The Trustees reviewed ongoing projects at their most recent meeting (press release). An aerial view of the Varsity House is available at the Memorial Field renovation page.