Dartmouth demolished Brewster Hall and will tear down Clement Hall soon. The Dartmouth has a photo of the site after demolition. This is what Brewster used to look like:

Brewster Hall

The Neukom Institute was rumored last year to be considering a request for an addition to Sudikoff.

Ledyard Canoe Club plans to rebuild Titcomb Cabin, which burned last spring. The logs will be put in the river at the Organic Farm and rafted down to Gilman Island. This will be the closest thing to a log drive seen on this stretch of the Connecticut in many years.

David Hooke (Reaching That Peak, 1987) gave a “smoke talk” in Commons on the Outing Club’s history. The Dartmouth reports that “smoke talk” refers to the club’s journal Woodsmoke, but it might also refer to the informal lectures of that name that took place in College Hall at the turn of the century.

The Wall Street Journal has an article on Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates that, although not mentioning it, helps explain their Berry Library project.

Check out the buildings in Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream.

The Dartmouth is doing a weekly articles on Dartmouth out-of-town, starting with the riding center at Morton Farm.

Dartmouth is offering for rent the second level of the 1910s library stacks addition to Eleazar Wheelock’s house. This could make a good society hall:

Rear ell, 4 West Wheelock Street, Hanover

The Tuck School’s Whittemore Hall, which houses executives in the summer, has been compared to a hotel, but it acts as a dormitory most of the time. Buchanan Hall after the Truex Cullins renovation really does seem to be essentially a year-round hotel for executive education students. There is even a front desk. The firm has taken the building’s original (semi-budget?) modernism and polished it.

Vermont Today states that the long-discussed hotel on South Street east of the Post Office parking lot is going ahead. Maine Course Hospitality Group is building it:

Detail of Maine Course website showing 6 South.

Construction will require the demolition of a building on the site.

Rauner’s blog describes a fantastic horizontal-scrolling map of the Connecticut River at Hanover (image). It was created by Robert Fletcher around the turn of the twentieth century and was found among some records of the Hanover Water Works Co. that the library received recently. The shallow box containing the map is portable, and the map contains a number of notes on related facts.

This map could be scanned, stitched together, overlaid with a current aerial, and made into a fascinating website. A lot of the landmarks noted by Fletcher have probably been under several feet of water since Wilder Dam raised the river in the 1950s; yet the River was not pristine in Fletcher’s time, and he notes that the low-water level at Ledyard Bridge was raised by six feet by the dam at Olcott Falls (Wilder).

A UNH news story notes that one of the large and notable relief maps of the state created by Dartmouth’s Professor Hitchcock in the late 1870s is being restored. This particular map came to UNH in 1894, so it is probably not the one depicted on the east wall of the Butterfield Museum after that building opened in 1899.

The Dartmouth reports that the freestanding Class of 1953 Commons and the Thayer Dining Hall replacement, projects that have been on hold for about a year and a half, have both been canceled. The funds raised for 53 Commons will fund the renovation of the original Thayer Hall instead.

Dartmouth has frequently wrestled with the question of whether to have a single main dining hall or a widely-scattered group of two or more dining halls. Commons in College Hall was the only dining hall from 1901 to 1937, when Thayer Dining Hall opened. But Thayer was just across the street from Commons, and connected by a tunnel — the centrality remained.

Thayer Dining Hall

About ten years ago, Dartmouth decided to put a new dining hall at the north end of campus as the centerpiece of a group of new dormitories and a polar counterpart to Thayer (see the North Campus Master Plan). Moore Ruble Yudell with Bruner/Cott designed the building, which was to be called the Class of 1953 Dining Commons and can be seen in a series of sketches from the spring of 2007.

Detail of photo of model of 53 Commons, designed by Moore Ruble Yudell with Bruner/Cott, from 1953 Commons Sketches

This building and a temporary dining hall were to relieve pressure from Thayer so that Thayer could be demolished and replaced by a building designed by Kieran Timberlake. Known in the collegiate context for spare stone dormitories and a glass-walled dining hall at Middlebury, Kieran Timberlake considered renovating Thayer in its Basis of Design (November 3, 2006). The firm’s final proposal involved the complete replacement of Thayer with a new building set back from Mass Row.

Detail of planning alternate 1a from Kieran Timberlake Basis of Design

The firm produced preliminary designs (The Dartmouth) before Dartmouth put the project on hold in the spring or summer of 2008.

Some concern over what appeared to be the Thayer Replacement’s poor preservation practice was expressed here. So although one wishes the circumstances were otherwise, it is good to see that Thayer will survive. No mention has been made of who will handle the renovation, but judging from their stylish renovations of Davenport and Pierson Colleges at Yale, Kieran Timberlake could produce a very interesting design.

[Update 01.17.2010: Both the article in the D and the press release note that Thayer will be renamed the Class of 1953 Commons. The release also emphasizes the preservation aspect and notes that work will begin this summer and end in 2011.]

Now that the Spaulding Auditorium loading docks have been reconfigured (see the Google Street View of the construction — Hanover is now available in Street View, by the way), the Visual Arts Center can go ahead as planned. William A. Berry & Son, Inc. is managing the construction. The architects’ project page has not returned yet.

Brewster Hall has been demolished, and Clement Hall will be torn down during the first week in February (The Dartmouth).

A Valley News article reports President Kim’s suggestion that Dartmouth host a national institute of the science of the delivery of health care. One imagines that it would accompany or expand upon the existing Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice. That institute is scheduled to occupy the postponed future Koop Medical Science Complex at the south end of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (map).

If not located at the hospital, however, such an institute would make an excellent candidate for placement north of the medical school, even on the golf course. It would not require parking for patients; it would benefit from its proximity to downtown — walkable if not convenient enough for a student function — and yet it would be indisputably part of the college.

To allay the concerns expressed here last year, this building and any other buildings on the site should be made to follow the form of the town, not the campus. A grid of streets with sidewalks and buildings, rather than a network of curving driveways with lawns, would promote density while acknowledging that the college does not expect students to walk this far from the Green on a regular basis. The buildings would harmonize with the campus without pretending to be a part of it — much more South Block than McLaughlin Cluster.

The Institute for Security, Technology, and Society could move to the site, along with other administrative offices now at remote locations, such as the offices in the bank building on Main Street and the Development Office, which is in Centerra.

The perfect completion of such a plan would involve the Hanover Country Club House. The club has wanted a larger and more convenient clubhouse for several years. A new east-west connector street at the north end of this expansion project, crossing the south end of the golf course between Lyme Road to Rope Ferry Road, could provide an excellent site for such a building. The clubhouse would occupy the north side of this street, looking up the stretch of greensward; the south side of the street would be a densely-built wall representing the end of the urban development of Hanover. Compare the fascinating conditions of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.

In Hanover, the clubhouse would stand on the north side of the northern cross-street, whichever was built:

Example of town-form development

[Update 02.06.2010: Map added.]

The office building at 4 Currier Place, designed by Truex Cullins (project page) for the Dartmouth Real Estate office (rental page) is nearing completion. Guy C. Denechaud’s article in the Valley Business Journal notes that Dartmouth has not put this much office space on the market in years.

Governor Wentworth signed Dartmouth’s charter — really more like its letters patent — on December 13, 1769. President Kim has made the 250th anniversary of this event in 2019 a sort of goal or endpoint for a ten-year budget process, such as in his October 26 faculty address (Vox), his presentation to the board at its fall meeting (The Dartmouth), and his December 1 financial presentation (pdf).

Although it is early to plan for the actual event, Professor Fischel’s letter to the editor of The Dartmouth suggests a new term: “quartomillennial” instead of “semiquincentennial.”