Dartmo.

Richard Polton, author of the book on alumnus architect Fred Wesley Wentworth, will speak about Wentworth at C&G on February 26 at 5 p.m. (via Becky). The event will be sponsored by ARC@D and DADA.

Wentworth designed the Casque & Gauntlet library addition about 100 years ago.

There are still no published exterior photos of the Inn’s new grand ballroom with its new Hopkins Center entrance underneath.

Some interior photos have shown up on Flickr: one, another.

The Inn’s photostream has many interior photos.

The new ballroom blocks the glazed north wall of Alumni Hall. This view from Alumni Relations’ Flickr photostream shows Alumni Hall with the newly-blocked wall on the left. On the other side of the wall, the balcony that originally overlooked the Zahm Garden now seems to be a service corridor.

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[Update 02.10.2013: Inn photostream link added.]

Lebanon planning documents for the Williamson Translational Research Building (pdf) locate the site on the west side of the hospital, south of the main entrance. The building will project westward from the Rubin Building into the C-shaped area north of the Borwell Building.

The big building will be clad in metal panels, like the rest of the complex, but its form should exhibit a bit more variety than is found in most of its neighbors. It will contain laboratories as well as an auditorium.

The architect is listed as HDR Architecture, Inc., a giant global firm whose website has a section not only for translational health sciences buildings but also for vivaria. This building appears to be the firm’s first in New Hampshire. It seems that the hospital’s 55-year collaboration with Shepley Bulfinch, still active as late as 2010, might be ending.

Dartmouth Alumni in Design and Architecture is having a logo competition, closing February 10.

The designers’ official page is now available and includes dozens of images.

The firm has provided a placeholder page on its website for more than six years.

• Baker is displaying an exhibit titled Innovation on the Slopes: The Early Years of Skiing at Dartmouth, and the Rauner blog has a post on the historic 1935 J-bar lift at Oak Hill.
• Dartmouth Now has an article on the Skiway.
• The Green Building Information Gateway has some information (pdf) on the North Campus Academic Center: The senior associate with architects KSWA is Lena Kozloski and the landscape architect is Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc., the same firm that is involved in the campus plan. The building will stand seven stories above grade (presumably on the northwestern facade, with fewer stories visible to the south).
• The Master of Health Care Delivery Science degree seems to be taking on a Tuck-y flavor with its first investiture (Tuck Today). It is notable that this is the first class to finish the MHCDS program; that the program is not “online” or “mostly online” but “low-residency” (see the chart); that the ceremony took place in January, but that graduates can still participate in Commencement in June; and that the ceremony was held at the Inn. (This photo of the class from Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream seems to be the first photo anywhere to show the new eastern addition to the Inn.)
• The Valley News reports (limited access) that the Friends of Hanover Crew will have to wait another year for a new dock.
• The Dartmouth reports that a student-driven coffee stand is opening in Stell Hall.
• Universitization: Back in 2011 the college lamented the fact that it was ranked “99th by the QS World University Rankings and 90th in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings” (The Dartmouth). The QS rankings for 2012 list a non-”University” at number one and list two “Colleges” among the top six schools. Indeed, four of the top ten schools are named something other than “University.” The current Times rankings place a different school without the word “University” in its name at number one. Three of the top eight are not “Universities.”
• The Valley News has an article (limited access) on ski jumping in high schools in the Upper Valley.
• The Concord Monitor and Dartmouth Now report that the Ice Chimes sculpture has been installed by the LSC.
• The Dartmouth reports on the beginnings of the Boora project to renovate and expand the Hop.
• The Planner has more information on the Collis renovation.
• An interesting early Machado & Silvetti design for the VAC and a Hop addition shows up in the portfolio of Seth Clarke Design on pages 42 and 43. That image of the Hop footprint is actually taken from Hopland on this website.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Skiway article repaired.]
[Update 03.03.2013: Some typos and grammar corrected.]

Korn Design of Boston and New York did the new branding for the Hanover Inn. Korn has also worked for the Charles Hotel and for Northeastern University, for whom it developed a proprietary typeface, Northeastern Baskerville, with Font Bureau.

At the Inn, the firm seems to have done its homework: the White Mountains photos are by Eli Burakian and

The typography for the logo is adapted from an original Dartmouth woodblock cut typeface designed in 1969 by Will Carter and Paul Hayden Duensing.

Korn has a photo of the typography in action on the Inn’s porte-cochere.

Dartmouth has marred the generally-well preserved front facade of the historic Wilder Laboratory by gluing (?) a plaque to it (APS News). It is hard to blame the American Physical Society for overlooking Dartmouth’s historic preservation goals or for drafting the text of the plaque with less care than one might hope for,* but Dartmouth should be embarrassed by this oversight.

When Wilder undergoes a restoration in the future, the plaque will probably be moved to an appropriate location. It is not clear whether the removal will leave permanent damage.

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*The plaque reads:

• The plaque has enough space to inform the reader that he is at Dartmouth College but too little space to provide the first names of the two researchers? They are Ernest and Gordon.
• Why say “At this site” when the event really did not take place at the front of the building? (I would argue that “At this site” usually indicates either a precise location or the site of a non-existent building, neither of which is the case here.)
• The experiments actually took place in some laboratory, probably upstairs: wouldn’t it be great if the plaque could tell us this by its text or its placement?
• Why omit the comma after 1903, especially if you are not going to end the first line after 1903? This mistake makes “E.F.” look like a new form of “A.D.”
• Are the pressure of light and the transfer of momentum between light and matter really one phenomenon, or are they two phenomena, as indicated by the commas around the momentum phrase?
• Is it traditional to include three items in the “from x to y” formulation, or would it be better to say “a wide range of fields including x, y, and z”?
• Does the redundant phrase “REGISTER OF HISTORIC SITES” imply some undeserved connection with the National Register of Historic Places? Wouldn’t that phrase be more accurate and explanatory if it occurred after the phrase “AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY”?

• The elm tree in front of Collis has been cut down (the Planner’s Blog). The tree stood north of the northwest corner of Main and Wheelock, as shown in the Google Street View image above.
• Adrain Dater reminisces about the early days of Thompson Arena at DartmouthSports.com.
• A Valley News article on two guys from Pike, N.H. who were going to the World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas explains the game but strangely does not mention Dartmouth, even to distinguish “beer pong” from “pong.”
• The Alumni Relations Office presents a photoset showing A History of Dartmouth in 20 Objects.
• The Valley News reports that the Lebanon Planning Board has delayed its approval of a 162,970 square foot research building at the hospital complex. The problem is traffic. (It is not clear whether this is the building formerly or presently called the Williamson Translational Research Building.) (Update: It is the Williamson according to the Union Leader.)
• The new Dartmouth website makes more and better use of the coat of arms than did the old site. A white outline of the shield is combined with text atop photographs on the President-Elect’s site (in this image) and at least one detail of a portion of the shield is blown up and used as a background in other places (in this image, reminding one of the current fifty-pence coin).
• Inside Higher Ed has an article on how the for-profit Grand Canyon University is preparing to field a Division I basketball team. Fascinating.
• President-Elect Hanlon, in his roles in planning and finance at Michigan, very likely worked with Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates. The firm was brought to Michigan by then-president Lee Bollinger, Dartmouth’s former provost, and designed a campus plan (2002) and life sciences complex (2003, 2005).
• City Prints produces an arresting Dartmouth map.
• “Dartmouth is, after all, not so much a college as a collection of stories about a college.” David M. Shribman and Jack DeGange, Dartmouth College Football: Green Fields of Autumn, 8.

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[Update 01.27.2013: Williamson identity information added.]

The Office of Planning and Design and the Office of Public Affairs are putting together a new post-Flash online campus map (the Planner’s Blog).

The sample map provided looks promising: the society names have been corrected (“AZD” is “Alpha Xi Delta”) and the obscuring blue triangles indicating accessible entrances have been removed. Because the map will be on line, the accessibility information can remain hidden until a particular area is moused over (or tapped on a mobile device? Lots of possibilities here).

Obscured by the news of Phil Hanlon’s appointment as the college’s next president (Dartmouth, Valley News, The Dartmouth) is the announcement by the Hop that Boora Architects of Portland, Oregon will design the long-awaited Hopkins Center expansion (Dartmouth Now). Boora has done several projects at Stanford and appears to have a lot of experience in expanding existing arts centers. The University of Oregon’s School of Music + Dance is an appealing project, and the Hop-like opening up of the Bass Concert Hall at UT Austin is remarkable.

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[Update 03.31.2013: Broken link to Hop announcement removed.]

Not described in the June post on this project is the wonderful aerial view of the Collis Center cutaway model created by Oudens Ello.

With its decapitated columns and especially its full trees, which encroach on the building and Romantically cast shadows on the floors of nearby rooms, it really does look like A View of the Ruins of the Collis Center. If the walls were crumbling instead of sliced cleanly, the image would be a complete homage to Giovanni Battista Piranesi or Joseph Gandy (Wikipedia; his unfortunately prescient painting of John Soane’s Bank of England as a ruin is in the Wikimedia Commons).

The project is bringing the serving area of the cafe right out to the front of the building, into the original reading room space. The existing mid-1990s dining room, originally built as the Club Room, will remain where it is.

The College Planner has made available long-term proposals of the Riverfront Master Plan (pdf) by Milone & MacBroom of Waterbury Vt.

The plan contains several intriguing ideas:

• New buildings behind and next to (north of) the Friends Boathouse.
• The expansion of the Fuller Boathouse and the rebuilding or removal of the singles shed next to Fuller.
• An addition to Ledyard Canoe Club (one hopes it is an addition: it could be a replacement) and the removal of the three boat sheds behind Ledyard.
• On Tuck Drive, a Sewer Pump House.
• The transformation of much of the current large parking lot into parkland.

• It is easy to forget that the Rufus Graves who was extremely involved in the college and the town – and who built the first bridge over the river at Hanover – is the same Rufus Graves who was central in the founding of Amherst College (Amherst bio).
• The New York Times has an article on the closing of the last Connecticut brownstone quarry. The remarkable part of the story is not to much that Portland Brownstone Quarries is closing, but that any of the quarries ever reopened once they closed during the 1940s. (This one apparently reopened during the mid-1990s.) Brownstone was used to entirely cover some collegiate buildings, such as Wesleyan’s Fisk Hall, but it does not seem to have been as popular as red brick and limestone. Harvard might be to blame. It is worth noting that brownstone was a popular trim material for Romanesque buildings, such as Bartlett and Wilson Halls at Dartmouth.
• The Boston Globe has “a series of New England getaways on public transportation,” and the latest number features idyllic Hanover, New Hampshire. It is good to learn about new restaurants that have sprung up, but it is easy to quibble with the use of “College Green” as a (Dublinesque) place name.
• One need no longer concern oneself about the faux-antique spelling of the name of the restaunt at “5 Olde Nugget Alley.” The building is now occupied by 3 Guys Basement Barbecue (see the restaurant site, PigTrip review).
• There is some neat rephotography on the master planning website. (See Shawn Clover’s remarkable composite images of the San Francisco Earthquake, then and now. Via Slate.)
• The Valley News on the extension of the rail trail to connect downtown Lebanon and West Lebanon.
• Low-angle or oblique aerial photos of Hanover: there are now many available. Lakes Region Aerial Photo has a good collection. Air Photo North America has a few with the Shower Towers still standing after Kemeny was finished. Aerial Design has lots of photos, including winter shots. Then there is this nice overall view published by Thayer School.
• The College Planner’s blog has seen a lot of activity lately.
• Thanks to Bruce for the mention on the Big Green Alert Blog. Both the team and the coverage are particularly exciting this year. Thanks to Kevin G. Quinn for the cite to the Old Division Football paper in Sports and Their Fans: The History, Economics and Culture of the Relationship Between Spectator and Sport (Mcfarland, 2009), 235. Thanks to the master planning staff for the cite to the Campus Guide in the history section of the master planning site.

TimberHomes LLC writes:

On a warm late-October day students and staff from Dartmouth College joined the TimberHomes LLC crew to raise the Fullington Barn, a 26′x36′ timber frame structure that will be used for farm related tasks and storage. Over the course of the next two weeks students and staff will continue to work with us to “finish” the frame by installing the roof & siding material, windows & doors, and also creating an insulated room.

The Dartmouth reports on the project, and Dartmouth’s Flickr photostream has a photo. (Dartmouth is also building a 9×12 privy for two composting toilets out there, according to the Hanover Planning Board minutes of August 21, 2012, pdf.)

This barn-raising is not the first for the college. Eleazar Wheelock wrote of the period ending September 10, 1772:

I have now finished (so far as to render comfortable and decent) the building to accommodate my students, of eighty by thirty-two feet, and have done it in the plainest and cheapest manner, which furnishes sixteen comfortable rooms, besides a kitchen, hall, and store-room. I have also built a saw-mill and grist-mill, which appear to be well done, and are the property of the school, and will likely afford a pretty annual income to it. I have also built two barns, one of twenty-eight by thirty-two feet, the other of fifty-five by forty, and fifteen feet post.[¹]

Those are very interesting details, but it gets even better:

I have also raised, and expect to finish, within a few days, a malt-house of thirty feet square, and several other lesser buildings which were found necessary. I have cleared, and in a good measure fitted for improvement, about seventy or eighty acres of land, and seeded with English grain about twenty acres, from which I have taken at the late harvest, what was esteemed a good crop, considering the land was so lately laid open to the sun. I have cut what is judged to be equal to fourteen or fifteen tons of good hay, which I stacked, by which the expense of supporting a team and cows the ensuing winter may be considerably lessened. I have also about eighteen acres of Indian corn now on the ground, which promises a good crop. My laborers are preparing more lands for improvement; some to sow with English grain this fall, and others for pasturing[.][²]

The Malthouse, which stood near where Wheeler Hall now stands, would have been used to prepare English grain (and corn?) for brewing in the Brewhouse:

A little more than three Years ago, there was nothing to be seen here but a horrid Wilderness, now there are eleven comfortable Dwelling-Houses (besides the large one I built for my Students, and other necessary Buildings, as Barns, Malt House, Brew-House, Shops, &c.) and some of them reputable ones, built by Tradesmen, and such as have settled in some Connection with, and have been admitted for the Benefit of this School, and the most of them near finished, and all expect to be habitable and comfortable before Winter, and all within Sixty Rods of the College[.][³]

It is not known where the Brewhouse stood, but it would have been on or near the Green. Wheelock also described that building, or a pair of buildings, as the “brew and bake house.”[⁴]

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Stephanie McFeeters, “College is the only Ivy not spending to lobby,” The Dartmouth (9 November 2012):

For example, when the Orozco murals in Baker Library were nominated to be a National Historic Landmark, Austin said she contacted Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., to ask if she would advocate on the College’s behalf to the National Park Service.

Sure enough, the nomination for The Epic of American Civilization Murals in Baker Library shows up on a list of draft nominations to NHL status, with the nomination form (pdf) prepared by Park Service historians Roger Reed and Alexandra Lord. The nomination is part of the Park Service’s American Latino Heritage Initiative.

The National Historic Landmark program is older than the National Register of Historic Places. Landmark nominations are made by the Park Service itself rather than by private parties and are much less common than National Register listings. Every Landmark is automatically listed on the National Register.

Until now, Dartmouth has not been particularly interested in these designations, and no college-owned building has been listed on the National Register. The private Sphinx Tomb is the only building listed in Hanover.

The Manton Foundation funded the recent renovation of the Reserve Corridor, where the murals are located, and the room has been renamed the Orozco Room (Dartmouth Now, The Dartmouth).

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[Update 11.11.2012: Last paragraph added.]

Bill Hemmel has a nice collection of recent aerial photos of the campus, including this one:

Dartmouth will demolish Gilman (at right, with white window frames) and Dana (the square building above it) to provide a site for the North Campus Academic Center.

At this stage in the design process, the siting of the Academic Center is the best and most interesting attribute of the building. Disobeying the grid that orients the rest of the medical school complex, the Academic Center will approximate the curve of College Street. Here is a very rough guess at the building’s footprint:

This would seem to rule out a New Maynard Street (not a serious idea):

The new building will wall off the medical quad from the street at least as much as Dana does now, and it will finally liberate the quad’s southwestern corner. In place of the frustrating and obstructive hyphen that new joins Gilman to Remsen, the new building will erect a broad ramp to give pedestrians free access to the quad and the Life Sciences Center beyond.

In the context of Vail and its older neighbors, the potentially dull, planar surfaces and ominous cantilevering of the new building might be hard to criticize. This is Dana’s entrance, for example:

But the obvious difference is that the med school’s Modernist buildings, all by SBRA, are built of red brick. While their scale and style set them apart, their material ties them to the campus. The Academic Center, which initially was shown as having one portion clad in brick, appears to be destined to wear a museumlike white material, possibly stone or metal paneling, all the way around.

The building guidelines in the 2002 Campus Master Plan propose that new buildings maintain at least some connection to the old:

There is a predominance of red brick buildings in Flemish bond, vertical, white, multi-paned windows, entry pediments, and pitched copper roofs. While we do not believe it desirable to limit the design of new buildings to a particular style, the use of some of these existing elements can go a long way in linking the new with the old.

Since it seems to be important to use color to set the Academic Center apart, one wonders whether the building could be built of white-painted brick. The oldest buildings of the campus, those of Dartmouth Row, have been painted white for decades, and yet they have been so little imitated that they remain strikingly different.

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[Update 11.17.2012: Broken link to Dana image fixed.]

From the planning site:

Master plan neighborhoods include:
Core Campus
North End
West End
Arts & Athletics

Campus-wide themes to be addressed include:
Campus Identity and Architecture
Development Capacity, Building Reuse, and Building Expansions
Housing & Campus Life
Landscape and Stormwater
Circulation, Transportation, and Parking

The process page says that the participants will start developing the framework plan during the fall of 2013.

Beyer Blinder Belle’s 2008 plan for Princeton is worth looking at. (Incidentally, what looks like Princeton’s prior plan of 1993-1996 was produced by Machado & Silvetti.) General observations on Princeton made after skimming the plan:

• Princeton and Dartmouth are surprisingly similar in size. Princeton has 5,100 undergrads and 2,500 professional and graduate students in four schools: engineering, architecture, public affairs, and a graduate college. Dartmouth has 4,100 undergraduates and 1,900 professional and graduate students in four schools: engineering, medicine, business, and group of graduate programs.
• Princeton’s compact, uniform block of a site emphasizes how much of Dartmouth is made up of reserved landscapes, whether green, park, cemetery, or slope. Princeton also has a vast unused land bank on the other side of the narrow lake that forms its south edge.
• Princeton’s ten-minute walking radius is centered on the student center, not the main library, central quad, or old main building.