Dartmo.

Dartmouth has planned to replace the concrete stands that make up most of Memorial Field’s main western stand for some time. The recognizable brick arcading and memorial arch will remain. The OPDC recently put a plan (pdf) and front and rear elevation drawings (pdf) on the project’s web page.

The Fleck & Lewis design preserves the street facade of the Larson building, including the tall brick attic story added above the entry in the 1950s (?) to screen the press box. Low brick cheek walls that appear to be new will flank this attic story to screen the wider replacement press box, but they are imperceptible and improve the transition from the tower to the parapet.

The field facade includes a straightforward-seeming set of replacement concrete seat risers and a new, squatter-seeming press box. The press box appears more dignified than its predecessor: its roof seems lower, and its bottom level appears to rest on a lower seating level than the old box’s did. It is certainly broader. New stair towers flanking the box introduce brick into this historically concrete facade. Like the old box, the new one will be faced in green-painted panels.

The project also appears among landscape architects Saucier & Flynn’s works in progress, and the historic field was the subject of a recent “Ask Dartmouth” query.

Now that the economic collapse has depressed Dartmouth’s endowment (story in The Dartmouth), the school has put the Memorial Field project on hold for two to six weeks to determine whether to go forward, Provost Barry Scherr and Executive V.P. Adam Keller announced on the 13th. The other projects on hold are the Visual Arts Center and the Truex Cullins renovation of Buchanan Hall (story in The Dartmouth).

The updates page for the stands renovation (updated November 3) is still announcing the start of construction as November 17.

The Valley News reported that the lease under which the Army Corps’ Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory occupies its complex on Dartmouth-owned property is ending. Both sides expect to negotiate a new lease with a higher rent. The federal installation is not subject to local zoning.

The OPDC put up new photos of the New Hampshire Hall renovation in mid-September. An article in The Dartmouth states that comments about the thoroughness of the gutting of Hitchcock prompted ORL to preserve wood interior trim in this project.

The delay in construction of the Class of 1953 Commons north of Maynard Street is due to trouble obtaining permits, The Dartmouth reported last month, but the building is still going ahead (October 31 article) and will be built between August 2010 and August 2012 (Capital Projects Schedule October 13, 2008 [pdf]).

[Update 11.18.2008: With the endowment drop (story in The Dartmouth) requiring budget cuts (story in The Dartmouth), some projects are being put on hold, but "We will complete planning already under way for projects which would then require additional financial resources before proceeding to the next phase: Class of 1953 Commons and the C. Everett Koop Medical Science Complex" (November 13 letter from Scherr and Keller).]

More photos of the Tuck Living and Learning Complex are available. The flanking elements of the three-building complex will be named, from west to east, Achtmeyer Hall and Pineau-Valencienne Hall. The connector portion, with its dining and lecture halls, will be named Raether Hall. (The front facade image available for some time now indicated the names of Achtmeyer, Raether, and “Donor.”)

The Dartmouth reports on the completion of this large project, and Willy Black comments positively in the CV Spectator.

Construction on the hotel going in south of the Post Office (north of Umpleby’s on South Street) will begin in 2009. The building will have an underground garage.

One learns from an abstract of a Quebec conference paper titled “Le Remplacement du Pont de Ledyard” that each of the four piers and abutments of the late-1990s Ledyard Bridge required a different type of foundation construction, since the riverbed and bedrock at that crossing are so irregular.

Red Rolfe Field has been changing by the day, to judge from the large number of photos posted on line recently.

The OPDC posted photos on September 5 and October 31. Bruce Wood at the Big Green Alert Blog posted photos on November 2, November 4 (and again), and on November 5.

What was the unreported cause of that delay during the initial excavation? OPDC Senior Project Manager Joseph Broemel was quoted in The Dartmouth: “Plus we found out about a steam vault underground where the bleachers would be which made it difficult to build.”

The Hill Winds Society is producing a book on school traditions with an organization called the Sphinx Foundation. The foundation is connected with the Sphinx Senior Society but not the College, as an editorial in The Dartmouth explains. It has Professor Emeritus Jere Daniell speak on different Dartmouth history topics now and then and sponsored his recent talk on the Wheelock Succession (article in The Dartmouth). The foundation apparently sends letters to incoming students.

The Dartmouth Outing Club Centennial is approaching at the beginning of 2009 and the club now has a page up with an ambitious schedule of activities.

Erik Anjou’s and Mark Bernstein’s documentary Eight: Ivy League Football and America has been released (The Dartmouth, Big Green Alert Blog). The official page suggests that the film shares with Bernstein’s book the shaky contention that the first intercollegiate football game was played in 1869. There was a “football” game played that year, but it was “football” in the English sense, what Americans now call soccer. The first college football game (ancestor of today’s American/gridiron football) was not played until 1874, when McGill’s rugby team played Harvard.