Monthly Archives: January 2012

Observing Berry Row

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I. A recent one-paragraph review.

One alum quoted in the Alumni Council’s annual report (pdf) stated:

The north campus is appalling. The buildings look like something from USC and it is barren of trees. Further, the buildings pointlessly drift off to the right, making it an unsatisfying prospect. Seriously, from Berry north they need to plant several thousand trees to soften and obscure this severe, inappropriate landscape.

There is something worth discussing here. The unusual wording itself creates a number of questions:

  1. What does “north campus” mean? Is it the area around Kemeny, the stretch from Berry to Moore, or the stretch all the way up to Gilman? The word “severe” in reference to the landscape suggests that he* is referring to the Kemeny area, which has low granite walls. But who knows?

  2. How quickly are trees supposed to grow? Berry Row was recently a construction site. One supposes the same trees are to a) provide general natural beauty (“The north campus is barren of trees”) and b) obscure a landscape.

  3. The buildings drift “pointlessly” to the right: does this mean that the buildings fail to lead to a point, such as the still-unbuilt terminus of the Berry Row axis, or does it mean that the alignment of the row should follow an unbending north-south line no matter what goes on in the surrounding streets? It is obvious that the curve in the line of buildings traces of the historic curve in the town’s street grid, which in turn follows the bend in the river.

  4. Is the USC comparison useful? The rather attractive buildings of USC do not look similar to the buildings of Berry Row and do not seem to have been designed by Moore’s firm, unlike, say, certain buildings of UCLA, UCSB (Kresge College, 1971), UCSC, and Berkeley (Haas School of Business, 1995).

II. Another take.

Kemeny/Haldeman seems successful. The building’s street facade is admirably modest in scale; the twin porticos are delightful. The way the building works with Sherman to bracket Carson Hall is important and it seems well done. The towers on the inside of the block are not as notable as they could be and disappoint somewhat. The handling of the termination of the main tower’s north facade might be a mistake: it is not much of a tower if it does not even meet the ridge of the roof.

Berry Row, view to north

Berry Row, view to north

The eccentric footprint of the McLaughlin Cluster has the potential to be too quirky for its own good, but it works; the apparently arbitrary inflection is not bothersome.

McLaughlin view north

McLaughlin Cluster, view north to Gilman

A brochure-quality view of McLaughlin captured by Google Street View looks to the south toward the towers of Sudikoff and Baker. The use of granite and white-painted brick, reminiscent of Dartmouth Hall, is appealing.

Bildner rear entrance

Bildner Hall, rear entrance

Street View has a photo of the hefty sculptural light-pier at Bildner’s front entrance.

The absence of shutters on McLaughlin is a bit of a let-down, but shutters seem to be the litmus test for traditionalism in Dartmouth buildings these days: Fahey-McLane was meant to be shutterless but got them anyway, according to one account, because they were important to a donor.

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* Really a “he”? He seems to be under 40 (the youthful use of “seriously”) but might view himself as having the tastes of someone over 60 (the use of the antiquated “prospect” instead of “view”).

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Alumni Council pdf fixed.]

Athletes and “student-athletes”

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Dartmouth has been debating the academic qualifications of its athletes lately (Jan. 6 editorial, response, another view). Athletes in the Ivy League are not paid to play but have at least the same access as other students to financial aid, which, as the Times points out, has lately made the league competitive with the scholarships of the big-time sports schools.

Meanwhile the big-time schools and the NCAA are under pressure to raise or eliminate the wage cap on their athletes. Joe Nocera’s proposal in the Times makes sense but might not go far enough, since it doesn’t excuse athlete-employees from the obligation to attend classes — a wasteful distraction that has long been something of a sham at some schools.

But Liberty University is leading the way: the school has sponsored a professional freestyle skier named Jay Panther (press release). Panther, who is pictured in the press release wearing a school shirt at the school’s football stadium, trains at the school’s ski area and represents the school in competitions — but he is not a student!

This goes well beyond the weirdness of the University of Phoenix having a stadium without a team to play in it, and it might represent an honest way out for big-time football. One wonders whether a place like Auburn or Miami might be better off if it eliminated its football program and then sponsored (like Liberty) or purchased (like Red Bull GmbH and the New York Red Bulls MLS team) a new minor-league football franchise that would wear its uniforms and represent it in competitions. The players would finally be paid what they are worth on the open market; the schools would no longer have to deal with a group of distracted and occasionally underqualified students; and the fans wouldn’t necessarily notice any difference.

Fullington Farm yet closer to becoming a rowing venue

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Discussions and controversies continue to slow the plan of the friends of Hanover High rowing to turn a part of Fullington Farm into a boating headquarters (Valley News article, Planning Board minutes Sept. 6 (pdf), Valley News article 1, article 2, Friends).

The Valley News noted on December 16 that the crew was allowed to move in but was denied permission to hold early-morning practices.

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[Update 06.03.2013: Broken link to Friends site replaced.]
[Update 05.12.2013: Broken link to Friends article replaced.]
[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Friends article replaced.]

Renovating the Buskey Building (7 Allen Street)

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UK Architects of Hanover have designed a renovation of the ground floor of the Buskey Building, a 1978 commercial block at 7 Allen Street, just past EBAs. The building’s second level is connected to the rear of the bookstore by a bridge: this is where the bookstore had its music department during the early 1990s.

Buskey Building Hanover

The Buskey Building in June 2005

Google’s Street View images, taken in the past few years, show the space as Omer & Bob’s Sport Shop, empty at the time of the photo and with a leasing sign in the window.

The client for this project is new health clinic for college employees called Dartmouth Health Connect (Dartmouth Now, The Dartmouth, Valley News; see also Forbes).

A rendering of the new interior is available at Dartmouth Now.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to DHC fixed.]

The coach stop at the Inn Corner

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During the nineteenth century, horse-drawn coaches delivered people to Hanover by dropping them at the southeast corner of Main and Wheelock. Bus companies continued to use the stop, including Vermont Transit (which apparently dropped its competent dark-green identity in 2008) and Dartmouth Coach.

The college and the town are now working on expanding the transit stop and moving it to a more spacious site to the east, in front of the Zahm Garden (The Dartmouth; see also this Valley News story).

The new bus stop will include a shelter for the first time: the shelter is likely to follow the basic design set out on page 19 of the Advance Transit bus stop design study by ORW (pdf). (ORW also created the new Ped/Bike Master Plan (pdf), which is particularly relevant to the college; see the College Planner’s post on the plan.)

The design of the little shelter in front of the Zahm Garden might involve a variety of considerations:

1. The history of the Inn Corner and the south end of the Green. Moving the bus stop eastward gives a bus space to pull up but also reflect the loss of the pedestrian’s freedom to use the street, a result of the growth of the auto (see Christopher Gray’s “Streetscapes” article “The Pedestrian Loses the Way,” New York Times (Nov. 13, 2011)).

2. The grassy island that once occupied the center of East Wheelock Street. Possibly a remnant of the Green from before the corner was cut off, the median was the site of a substantial masonry traffic marker for a time. The bus stop study proposal notes that “[a] small median is an optional element that can serve as a pedestrian refuge and act as a traffic calming feature.”

Littig aerial litho

Turn-of-the-century image showing traffic island, possibly optimistic

3. The Wheelock Street crossing. The study does not seem to show the crosswalk to be the raised feature that The Dartmouth mentions, but students would benefit if the crosswalk were elevated to the level of the sidewalk. This could be just the beginning — if the sidewalks were protected with bollards, the raised walk could be extended to cover the entire street between Main and College.

4. Architectural concerns. The new shelter could be made of glass in order to be overlooked, or it could be designed as a proud pavilion that establishes an axis with Baker Tower. It should not be so valuable that it could not be replaced in the future by the Hopkins Center wing that really belongs on this site.

5. The Hop’s somewhat unsuccessful landscaping. The isolated patch of grass north of the Zahm Garden does little more than pointlessly narrow the sidewalks that surround it.

Just a thought.

The Main Street pedestrian mall idea

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The Planning Board minutes of September 20 (pdf) mention that pedestrianizing Main Street, presumably between Lebanon and Wheelock, was considered several years ago and did not receive the support of the Chamber of Commerce.

The malls in Boulder and Charlottesville are fantastic places that appear to be successful, but each also seems to require a population that is much larger than Hanover’s. The extreme fluctuation of the college population would drain the life out of a Hanover mall far too often. The questionable closure of South College Street in the 1960s leaves no alternative route for the traffic that would be shunted away from the upper end of South Main Street: creating a pedestrian mall would be a radical and risky venture.

A better move might be to turn the diagonal parking on South Main Street into parallel parking, widen the sidewalks, raise the street surface, and define the edges of the street with bollards. Restaurants could claim spaces for outdoor seating, and the existing trees and benches would become less of an impediment to foot traffic. Northbound and eastbound traffic would be encouraged to use Lebanon Street and Park Street.

’53 Commons completed

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The Class of 1953 Commons project, a renovation of Thayer Dining Hall (The Dartmouth, The Dartmouth), has finished.

Dartmouth Now has an article on the dedication with a flash (!?) slideshow of photos on Flickr. Bruner/Cott also has an image of the main dining room, and a first-floor plan appears on the DDS portion of the college website.

The building’s interior is hard to recognize. The photos show crisp white walls and sunlight replacing the cramped spaces and dim lighting of Thayer’s last renovation, which occurred in the 1980s. The main dining room, the site of Full Fare in the early 1990s and later Food Court, retains its original wooden roof trusses but abandons the painted flower ceiling panels. The south side dining room (Food Court of the early 1990s) is cool and sophisticated. The building now offers dining on the second floor, probably where the miniature convenience store called Topside once was, and perhaps where DDS offices once were.

Outside, the new stair is clad in granite. Irrespective of the changes in the menu, it looks like a nicer place to eat in.

The Inn addition as a Hop addition

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The Inn project, planned last spring (The Dartmouth, The Dartmouth), is getting under way.

The Inn Blog describes the

addition of multiple new suites and guest rooms plus the refurbishment of all existing sleeping rooms. The first floor will house a ballroom and junior ballroom with the current location of the Daniel Webster Room to become a pre-function space. The restaurant will be relocated to the Hayward Lounge and will include additional private dining rooms. Finally a half dozen or so “smart” conference rooms will be added on the lower level rounding out the renovations.

The architects are Cambridge Seven Associates, with interiors designed by the Bill Rooney Studio.

Renderings describe the most interesting part of the project, an infill addition in the Zahm Courtyard:

A crisp glass box floats within the historic arms of the old building, integrating a new 3,500 sf ballroom into the existing structure.

This glass box is in fact a new entrance to the Hopkins Center. The glass box is just where it should be, since, in some ways, the Zahm entry has always been the real entrance to the Hop. One might regret only the fact that the new entrance rests on the floor of the courtyard instead of using an interior ramp or stair to rise to the level of the street. The project has required the shifting of the Hinman Boxes (image).

The architects have made this entrance pavilion into a miniature version of the Hop’s most prominent entrance facade. There is no marquee here, but there is a glazed ground level topped by a little porch roof and above it a high, glazed second level divided into attenuated bays.

Behind the glazed chamber is a new “exterior” wall, presumably marking the edge of the ballroom. The architects initially intended the wall to be of brick but switched to zinc-coated steel panels (Planning Board minutes Sept. 6 (pdf)). The less-expensive material will probably provide a better visual marker of the joint between the Inn and the Hop.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to C7A renderings replaced.]