Dartmo.

Dartmouth’s Real Estate Office is finishing 68 South Main, the most prominent building in the South Block project. Its neighbor, the frame building in the drawing, is number 72.

The latest rendering of the hotel planned for South Street is an improvement over the plainer, more prefab first version.

“The Chimneys,” Ledyard Bank’s building at 2 Maple Street, is finished.

Although Dartmouth’s proposed acquisition of the high school would have deprived the town of an important element, it would have given the College a large tract of land very close to the campus. Part of the property was already in the form of sports fields, and the high school itself always seemed like it could make a good rugby clubhouse. The swap did not go through.

An unreleased proposal from a few years ago shows that someone was at least thinking of using the property for a new baseball field (putting something like Biondi Park there would have allowed Centerbrook to expand Alumni Gym) and, more interestingly, for faculty or graduate student housing. The ranks of buildings were to stand next to St. Denis Church.

Excerpt of plan from Bagnoli presentation

The plan appears in a 2007 presentation (pdf) by architect David Bagnoli of the Washington, D.C. firm of Cunningham | Quill and might have been created by that firm.

What is most remarkable about this plan is that it nearly replicates a housing development that once stood on the same site, the wartime Sachem Village (it was the precursor to the present Sachem Village). A nice aerial of this original Sachem Village appears on page 90 of Frank Barrett’s latest book, Early Dartmouth College and Downtown Hanover.

Thumbnail of portion of page 90 in Early Dartmouth College and Downtown Hanover

References to these still-vague proposals appear in Dartmouth’s recent master plans:

• The Hanover Bypass: A new interchange for Interstate 91 south of Norwich would send a new bridge across the Connecticut, leading to a road through the woods to Route 120 near the DHMC. This would allow hospital and Lebanon traffic to avoid the corner of Main and Wheelock. Dartmouth and the hospital own most of the land along the route, which lies in Lebanon, and seem likely to favor a bypass. The Town of Lebanon does not appear to favor it.
• The Bartlett Hall Addition: An extension to the east, at least, toward the Sphinx, would occupy a site with plenty of room, some of it a vacant lot left by Culver Hall. The road could be eliminated or moved eastward. Bartlett is extremely distinctive and picturesque, and any addition would have to answer the question of style right away.
• College Park Gates: this idea is from Saucier & Flynn’s landscape master plan. The College Park once had a design language of its own, although it is difficult to tell whether it was more Victorian iron curlicues or Victorian bark-covered sticks, as in the Adirondacks. At any rate, College Park does not seem like a red-brick Georgian place. The plan also suggests bringing College Park down to Wheelock Street, at least by reference. It would be nice to connect the Sphinx, which seems like an island, to the park itself.

[Update 10.10.2008: Replaced Route 10A with Route 120.]

A lot of river-related planning activity has focused on the Fullington Farm/Chieftain Inn area north of campus recently.

Although the Upper Valley Rowing Foundation seems to have settled on a site closer to Wilder Dam for its future boathouse (design by U.K. Architects), its past meeting minutes have mentioned an interest in buying Fullington Farm, or at least a right to use part of it, from Dartmouth. Now the Friends of Hanover High Crew have signed an agreement with Dartmouth and plan to build a community boathouse on the farm (UVRF May 2008 minutes pdf).

Fullington Farm is the site of the Dartmouth Organic Farm and might be the location of the Lyme Road site that is occasionally proposed as a new home for Thayer School (see 2002 Master Plan, 14 pdf).

At the Chieftain, Black Bear Sculling runs a sculling program. Now the Chieftain is requesting a zoning variance to allow a private club on the property (Zoning Board of Adjustment July 10, 2008 pdf). The zoning board minutes do not indicate the purpose of the club or whether it has anything to do with rowing.

The post-Fuller Audit addition to Jens Larson’s Tri-Kap house is depicted in drawings now available in pdf. Smith & Vansant Architects designed the set of large, traditionally-detailed brick additions: a three-bay addition to the west, a one-bay addition to the east, replacing the original porch, and a covered porch on the front or south facade. Renderings of the expanded basement indicate that it can fit four pong tables.

The designs for Memorial Field’s West Stand or the replacement for Thayer Dining Hall have not been revealed, but a few smaller items of interest have come out over the past few months:

• Construction of the ’78 Life Science Center began in early September, notes the OPDC, after the Occom Pond Neighborhood Association’s appeal of Hanover’s zoning permission was dismissed (press release). A webcam shows the site when it’s light out.
• The reconstruction of Rolfe Field and the construction of the surrounding Biondi Park have been delayed by site conditions, quoted Jim Hunter of Clark Construction Company: “Dartmouth is just so old that you never know what you’re going to
  find underneath the ground.” When students were digging trenches in the area during World War I, they found an old house foundation.

• Moore Ruble Yudell has a page up for the North Campus master plan. It is under work > campus > planning > north campus on the firm’s website.
• A huge amount of effort has gone into building a sprawling housing development near the hospital at Gile Hill, and into making it not seem like affordable housing (site map). The project was designed by Gossens Bachman Architects of Montpelier, designers of the Rock of Ages Corporation Visitor Center and of a design for the Vermont Granite Museum.

Yale announced that Robert A.M. Stern, head of Yale’s architecture school and architect of Moore Hall at Dartmouth (but nothing at Yale), will design two new residential colleges that will join the dozen colleges already existing and allow enrollment to grow from about 5,200 to about 6,000. A nice map (pdf) shows the relation of the site to the existing colleges; the perceived distance from the center seems to be causing controversy.

Yale has come out with a new book called Yale in New Haven that focuses on the institution’s urbanism.

A check of the latest online map for Yale shows an impressively detailed work, but using it still seems to require a great deal of calculation by the user. Everything interesting seems to lie on the seams between the map zones. Perhaps we have all been spoiled by Google Maps’ draggability. The map instructions are a bit funny:

“Welcome to the Yale University interactive map. Please use the map to quickly find buildings and organizations on campus.”

A well-illustrated article on Hanover’s postwar Modernists, Edgar and Margaret Hunter, considers their work in the context of other North Carolina architects.

The current project list out of Dartmouth’s design office (TruexCullins & Partners appears to have studied the renovation project and considered recommending the construction of 30-room addition to the Inn.