The Big Green Alert Blog has photos of the Floren Varsity House and reports that the building is ahead of schedule.

More detailed plans and photos of a model of the Life Sciences Building are available. The building has a bit of the New Deal Post Office about it (see the Post Office of Old Chester, Pa.), while the gabled greenhouse gives it some of the feeling of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus and thus Pope’s Scottish Rite Temple in Washington, D.C.

The OPDC continues its photo essay on the Bradley/Gerry demolition, and the buildings are almost completely gone.

Baltimore firm Ayers Saint Gross has a site that compares the central portions of dozens of college campuses.

Places magazine (January 15, 2005), guest-edited by Frances Halsband, is all about “the place of campus.”

Some more shots of the progress on Floren, mostly interiors, are available from the Big Green Athletics.

A few well-illustrated recent studies share a recognition of the urban nature of the college campus:

• R.M. Kliment and Frances Halsband (designers of Burke Laboratory) propose a pragmatic route called “The Walk” (pdf) running through several varied urban blocks to tie together isolated properties owned by Brown University.
• Yale’s extensive “Framework for Campus Planning” (pdf) by Cooper, Robertston & Partners maps the trash-collection routes of Yale’s campus while noting that most buildings there have university names as well as street addresses; the scale comparison of Yale to the other Ivies (including “Dartmouth University”) is interesting. The plan covers signage, noting the six official typefaces and proposing a unified system. Cooper, Robertson is also working on Harvard’s huge Allston expansion.
• Oxford has a master plan (pdf) by Rafael Viñoly for the site of the Radcliffe Infirmary, up by the Royal Oak pub. It offers several Parisian blocks lining pedestrian avenues that focus on the Radcliffe Observatory, which is the chief building of Green College.

Rogers Marvel Architects have added some images of the buildings they proposed in their 2000-2002 arts master plan. The plan helped suggest the siting of the Visual Arts Center currently in design by Machado and Silvetti.

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.

Dartmouth Life has an update on new athletic facilities and notes the upcoming renovation of Red Rolfe Field. Artificial turf will replace the grass, the dugouts will be rehabilitated, and a new scoreboard will replace the old.

The Zahm Memorial Garden, which filled the sunken space in front of the Hinman Boxes alongside the Inn, has been redesigned as the War Memorial Garden by Saucier + Flynn. The WWII/Korea memorial, a granite plaque, has occupied the end wall of the Inn since it was moved from under the Hood’s upper bridge in the early 1990s. The school moved the Vietnam Memorial, a sculpture, from the Collis Center to the garden. The Class of 1945 also gave the garden a plaque.

Landscape architects Saucer + Flynn have posted new information including descriptions of eight projects for Dartmouth as well as landscapes for North Park Street Graduate Student Housing, 7 Lebanon Street, the DHMC, projects in Centerra, and the Sphinx.

The firm also designed a wrought-iron fence for Skull & Bones in New Haven, which is not the kind of landscape project you see every day.

The Trustees recently discussed updates to Lo-Yi Chan’s 2001 master plan and the designs for the Visual Arts Center, the Life Sciences Building, the Class of 1953 Commons, and the New Thayer Dining Hall (press release).

Peter Bohlin, whose firm is designing the Life Sciences Building, designed the Vermont Institute of Natural Science Nature Center not far from Hanover in Queechee, Vermont (pdf).

The possibility of building a temporary bubble (an Air-Supported Structure) over one of the Chase Fields for football practice was discussed during the winter (The Dartmouth) and covered conclusively by the very active Big Green Alert Blog (earlier and later stories). Bubbles turn out to be beautiful (as at the Stadium) but quite expensive.

The Dartmouth covered Senator John Sununu’s visit to the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center in Centerra.

The state-run NH Business Resource Center has a thorough article about the incubator.

Ethanol firm Mascoma Corporation now occupies the majority of the building.

It is always interesting to see familiar architectural motifs reappear elsewhere: Robert Venturi reused Berry Library’s colonnade screen at the Lehigh Valley Hospital in Pennsylvania (pdf).

In “Zeta Psi Rising,” Michael Edgar posited that the recent lack of maintenance of Jens Larson’s Zeta Psi house was so great that the cost of repairs and code compliance might make demolition and replacement cheaper. The source of this speculation is not clear.

A large amount of interest in the history of American football is accompanying the fiftieth anniversary of the Ivy League. The Big Green Alert Blog has linked (more) to trailers for two new films about Ivy football: The League and For Love and Honor, which is based on Mark F. Bernstein’s Football: The Ivy League Origins of an American Obsession.

Both films appear to give some credit to the myth that football began in 1869 when Princeton played Rutgers. (The trailer for the first film mentions that game; the book upon which the second is based also mentions the game.) As has been noted here before, although the teams called their game “foot ball,” the fact that the British still call soccer by that name should be a tipoff: the teams were actually playing soccer, which was and is also known as Association Football. Rutgers acknowledges that the game was FA football and not rugby football in its website about the game.

Although the teams that played in the 1869 soccer match might be called the first American football teams, since they later switched rules to play rugby against other schools, the match itself was not half as significant as the 1874 Harvard-McGill rugby match or the 1875 Harvard-Yale rugby match, either of which is more properly known as the birth of intercollegiate football.