Various aspects of Rich's work at Dartmouth, from dormitory floorplans to building patterns, show the institution making a careful transition to a university by reinforcing collegiate values. Rich's very first project for the College, however, introduced the university in a manner that was more imperious than subtle. In his 1895 plan for the Quadrangle, Rich proposed that the College begin its expansion in a complex of four buildings north of the Green (Fig. 74). The way Rich proposed to arrange the buildings in the Quadrangle and the mode in which he clothed them represent anything but an easy transition: instead the complex is more of a metropolitan imposition. The fact that the College dedicated one of the buildings to reinforcing college spirit makes the overall scheme even more paradoxical. In the end, circumstances prevented the College from completing the Quadrangle as Rich intended it, which may shed light on why his sensibility in his later work on the campus was so different.

Early in its existence the College recognized the importance of the land north of the Green. After originally granting the land to Professor Sylvanus Ripley in the early 1770s, the College asked him to sell it back in 1784. If Ripley had agreed, the larger Green would have aligned with Dartmouth Hall on its center, but he did not and the plan came to nothing.¹⁸² Houses eventually appeared on individual plots along Wentworth Street and the other streets that define the block.

A Kansas City doctor named Ralph Butterfield (1818-1892) of the class of 1839 was the catalyst that renewed the College's interest in the site in the 1890s. In August of 1892 Butterfield's will left more than $135,000 to the College, stipulating that at least $30,000 go toward a new science museum.¹⁸³ When Tucker took over as President early in 1893 the College was already contemplating a site for the museum on the corner of Wentworth and College Streets. The Butterfield Museum (1895-6) (Fig. 75) became the first building project of Tucker and Rich.¹⁸⁴

Knowing the Museum would not be their last building, the Trustees hired Charles Eliot to suggest a long-term growth strategy in 1893. Eliot was the son of the Harvard president and a young landscape architect with Olmsted & Eliot.¹⁸⁵ Eliot had recently designed a metropolitan park system for Boston as well as the new N.H.C.A.M.A. campus in Durham. His three alternatives for Dartmouth were a terrace system north of Rollins Chapel, a new group in the College Park behind Dartmouth Hall, and a quadrangle north of the Green. The College would eventually follow all three, but Eliot recommended the third, despite the expense of buying private houses, and that is the plan with which the College began.¹⁸⁶

Meeting in Concord at Trustee Frank Streeter's home, the Trustees discussed various ways to arrange the Quadrangle. The members of the board who made up the Committee on Buildings and Improvements gave a report with a plan in hand, and the board gave its approval to one scheme. An Alumni Memorial Hall would stand in the center of the Quadrangle and the Butterfield Museum would stand on the southeast corner. On that same evening of June 8, 1894, the Trustees also voted to build a wooden addition to Sanborn House; the College took the first piecemeal step toward Administration Row.

Though the College soon reversed the positions of the two main buildings in the Quadrangle, the plan was underway.¹⁸⁷ The College already owned the Rood House (1824) on the southeast corner of the block, and it started purchasing nearby building sites (Figs. 76-78). Within weeks of approving the Quadrangle the Trustees bought the Lord House (1802) next to the Rood House, with the rear of its lot to provide the site for the Butterfield Museum.¹⁸⁸ At the same time the College agreed to buy the Leeds House (1786) adjacent to the Lord House, later planning to move it to the College lot on the east end of the new Webster Avenue.¹⁸⁹ The College also bought the Mildred Crosby House (ca. 1786) north of the church in June of 1894.¹⁹⁰ Tucker soon began requesting that alumni provide the $50,000 the Memorial Hall would require.¹⁹² Rich continued to work on designs for the Museum, with a plan appearing in the student paper that fall.¹⁹³ Just months after the College began buying up properties, the Lamb & Rich plan for the Quadrangle appeared in print.¹⁹⁴

A contemporary perspective view of the complex (Fig 79) also survives to accompany the Quadrangle illustrations that appeared first in the New York Times and later in the American Architect and Building News.¹⁹⁵ These views together describe an ambitious plan. The Museum stands at the rear of a rectangular space that is open on its south side toward the Green. A recitation hall flanks the space on either side, though the College later abandoned those buildings as unnecessary. At the center of the square the plan sets off a small plot, probably for the statue of Eleazar Wheelock that Tucker wanted, though Dartmouth had not previously possessed any outdoor statuary.¹⁹⁶ This was a complex of greater formality and axiality than anything Dartmouth had previously built. The ensemble offered a few concessions to its site by opening onto the Green and granting a degree of respect to the eighteenth-century Church of Christ. The College did not own the church, but the plan took it on as a found object, balancing it on the west with the Memorial Hall. Overall, however, the ensemble looked as if it would settle uncomfortably on a Hanover as yet unchanged by Tucker's expansion.

The Quadrangle plan proposed that the College occupy houses whose owners presumably had something to say about the academic incursion. Tucker later wrote

Very properly too, the prospect of being dispossessed of their old-time homes was not welcome to many. Neither was it an altogether pleasing thought to those who were to carry out the process, to be the means of breaking up the quiet beauty of a New England village, even though offering in exchange the architectural effects of college buildings.¹⁹⁷

To house the families that its plans displaced, the College even opened up a new district of Hanover (Fig. 80).¹⁹⁸ On the former Morse Farm the College laid out Webster Avenue (1896) and had J.C. Olmsted plan a road to the north called Occom Ridge (1899). The College built six houses on each of these two streets and sold them to faculty members.¹⁹⁹ The College also built a faculty duplex called Ridge House (1898-99) that Rich designed (Fig. 81). This residential expansion demonstrates not only the College's desire to provide for its growing faculty, but the fact that the College had became a real estate developer in order to complete its plans for the Quadrangle.

Image and status as much as practicality dictate how Rich ordered the Quadrangle. The concerns for symmetry, order and monumentality characterize the space: this is an ensemble that is urban in character, conveying civic rather than academic associations. Much as the Low Library stands in the center of Charles McKim's 1892-4 plan for Columbia University (Figs. 16, 17), a 1908 iteration of the Quadrangle even placed an administration building in the center of the square, among other changes (Fig. 82).²⁰⁰ The Quadrangle is a miniature version of the same ideas that lie behind McKim's plan. Like Columbia, Dartmouth is not meshing the new into the old but building an entirely new campus. Columbia owned the land on which McKim proposed it should build; Dartmouth hoped to take over its whole town block and build on its perimeter, which is where the name "Quadrangle" comes from.²⁰¹

The Quadrangle also draws from the civic spaces of contemporary City Beautiful plans. The popular 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago comes immediately to mind, since like that plan the Quadrangle followed the Beaux-arts model of the open-ended cour d'honneur (Fig. 83). Older Georgian sources offer themselves as well: one writer named the Senate House of Cambridge University as a source for Webster Hall, and indeed the whole complex is reminiscent of James Gibbs' 1728 proposal (Fig. 84). Just as Cambridge failed to finish Gibbs' scheme, Dartmouth failed to complete its Quadrangle. The institution formerly content to occupy two sides of the Green was flexing its muscle nonetheless.

The two buildings of the Quadrangle differ considerably from the later buildings Rich designed for Dartmouth. Tucker laid the cornerstone for the Butterfield Museum (Fig. 75) in the summer of 1895 and the building came to fruition first since the College had the money in hand.²⁰² Lebanon quarries supplied the granite for the basement as they would for most other Dartmouth buildings. But the material Rich specified for the superstructure of this building set it apart: it was "buff" or "yellow" Roman brick. Only Rand & Taylor's Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital (1893) had used a similar material in the northern part of Hanover, and such bricks would not appear again in a major building. Montgomery Schuyler reserved his harshest criticism for the Museum because it was so different, writing that the building was the equivalent of a musician "beginning out of key." Rich seemed not to expect to build anything else at the College, "for the Butterfield Museum has as little in common with its successors as with its evidently disesteemed predecessors."²⁰³

Buildings contemporary with the Museum help explain why Rich chose the medium he did. Lamb & Rich, of course, had used yellow brick in their Berkeley School of only a few years earlier (Fig. 50). The school building was a successful and important one for Rich's reputation. Along with the Roman brick, the Berkeley School would lend its vocabulary of limestone and terra-cotta to the Museum. By projecting solidity and authority through the form of a Renaissance palazzo, the Museum also accompanies a number of contemporary libraries, museums and other cultural institutions. Most notable among these is the Boston Public Library, which Charles McKim designed in 1888 (Fig. 85), though a later public library in Newark, New Jersey shows the trend just as well (Fig. 86).²⁰⁴ As an example of Renaissance classicism, the Butterfield Museum generated an imposing effect and appealed to elevated popular taste.²⁰⁵

The Butterfield Museum, however, was by no means Rich's most incongruous design for Dartmouth. In what is ironically Dartmouth's most obvious attempt to preserve college spirit, the school planned to build an ornately-domed buff-brick building that it called Alumni Memorial Hall (Figs. 87-89). Rich redesigned the building several times as budgets shrank and needs changed, and it finally emerged as Webster Hall of 1906-7 (Fig. 90). The first version of the hall appears in the 1895 American Architect and Building Newsand fits with the Classical idiom of the Museum. A rusticated ground level denotes the administrative offices and the saucer dome atop the building crowns the memorial hall space itself. Inside, column-screens separate the hall from a pair of side aisles, each of which has a chapel-like "Special Memorial" at its south end. This element of religiosity would remain a central part of the building even as plans changed over the next ten years. A number of the building's features make this building resemble Stanford White's 1896-1903 Gould Library at New York University (Figs. 91, 92).²⁰⁶ The buildings share the same materials and dome shape as well as the semi-circular colonnade to the rear, though the Gould's is on a completely different scale from the one at Dartmouth. That the College had originally planned to make its Memorial Hall the focus of the Quadrangle, as White's library is, makes the comparison even more apt.

Surviving sketches depict two later versions of the Memorial Hall.²⁰⁷ The first building is generally similar to the 1895 scheme, though larger in every dimension (Figs. 93, 94).²⁰⁸ The dome now stands on what amounts to a short tower and the pair of Ionic columns in antis on the front facade have become a three-story Ionic temple front. Sketches of the second scheme depict Rich's largest and most ornate version of the building (Fig. 95).²⁰⁹ The dome has an elaborate cupola that reaches about 116 feet in height. The memorial hall itself continues to occupy essentially the whole second and third floors of the building, below a flat beamed ceiling under the dome. Now a Corinthian temple front express the memorial hall on the exterior, while the administrative ground floor below has a set of fluted Doric columns of its own, standing ahead of the plane of the facade.

The Webster Centennial of 1901 and its fundraising campaign allowed the College to finally begin work on the building.²¹⁰ Rich worked up a final plan that discards many elements of the earlier schemes, and for the first time the hall appears without a dome (Fig. 96).²¹¹ A pair of pitched roofs now intersect where the dome formerly rose. The building's Ionic front porch could be a flattened version of the porch in front of the contemporary College Hall; the massing of this building also gives it something of the appearance of an Administration Row building. The small domes over the entrance stairways, however, remind one of the building's earlier frivolity. Rich likely hoped to use the familiar light Roman brick in the building, which took on the name of Webster Hall. Daniel Webster's grandson laid the cornerstone during the festivities in September, 1901 on the spot where the College had demolished the Rood House the year before.

Alumni subscriptions apparently did not cover the $100,000 the building was to cost. The Concord contractors Mead, Mason & Co.²¹² did not build past the foundation, which would remain untouched for several years.²¹³ In the meantime the administration decided its offices did not belong in the building and had Rich design a new, lower building.²¹⁴ The Dartmouth Hall fire of 1904 delayed the project further, despite engendering a generous spirit among alumni. The fire also gave Webster Hall its new function as the general-purpose auditorium that Dartmouth Hall's Old Chapel had previously been.²¹⁵ Rich continued making sketches of domed buildings, some of which Tucker kept "to show the Trustees what might have been."²¹⁶ Tucker was looking for a building that lacked most of the ornament of previous designs and requested as much of Rich in 1906.²¹⁷

The Trustees selected a final design for Webster Hall in 1906. The Central Building Company of Worcester, Massachusetts built the new superstructure on a foundation now ten feet longer than it had been.²¹⁸ The College dedicated the building on Dartmouth Night of 1907, with the massive bronze doors completing the front entrance late in 1908 (Fig. 97).²¹⁹ Webster Hall as it finally emerged lacks the rusticated administrative floor of previous designs: the entry vestibule simply opens onto the auditorium that replaced the memorial hall space. The front facade of the building is a simple temple form, with four Corinthian columns standing in antis. Some non-traditional features have crept into the building, such as the massive steel beams that support the balconies under which they hide, and the pattern of electric lights in the coffers of the main room. The coffered apse, however, survives from the earliest designs. Most importantly, Webster Hall is no longer a buff Roman brick building but uses the Harvard brick and limestone details of Tuck Hall and its followers on the Green.²²⁰ Nonetheless the spare temple form and Corinthian columns make Webster the most monumental Classical building at the College.

The programs of the two Quadrangle buildings add complexity to the idea that the whole scheme was an unrehearsed anti-collegiate move on the part of Rich and Tucker. On one hand Butterfield specified that the College should instruct students in what were his amateur interests: paleontology, archaeology, ethnology and kindred subjects. The museum was a container for specimens that illustrated these subjects. The College received the bequest at a time when President Bartlett's administration was still keeping scientific study outside of the College proper in the form of the Chandler School. The Museum represents the intrusion of science into the Classical college: even as the contractors were finishing the Museum, Tucker held his first sentimental Dartmouth Night.

As if to compensate for the scientific museum, the College intended its Memorial Hall to be a shrine to tradition and memory, much more than simply a Civil War memorial. The College had never built a memorial to its Civil War dead as Harvard had built the massive Memorial Hall of Ware & Van Brunt.²²¹ Though Richards & Park of Boston designed a building for such a purpose at Dartmouth after the war, the College did not build it. Instead, that firm's Bissell Gymnasium of 1866-7 memorialized nothing more than its donor.²²² Webster Hall's role as a reminder of the College's own history overshadows the Civil War tablets in the vestibule. "In a stately hall will be gathered and preserved all that will keep in the general mind the romantic beginnings of the College" explained General Streeter at the cornerstone ceremony.²²³ History emerged in the hall in the specific form of portraits of College worthies, which The Dartmouth had named as the building's function as early as 1890.²²⁴ Professor Keyes arranged the portraits: men eminent in their professions went in the transepts while paintings of the origins of the College, its Supreme Court case and its presidents hung in the apse (Fig. 99). Easels holding young and old portraits of Webster stood before the apse, while his desk stood in a place of honor inside the apse itself.²²⁵ A coffered half-dome over the apse gave Webster the effect of a church space, and Tucker and Rich considered installing a sixty-foot painting along the rear wall to explain the growth of the College.²²⁶

The experience of viewing the portraits, religious in its intensity, served a didactic purpose. The College intended its instill college spirit in new generations of students. "Every man feels the masterful grasp of the past upon his shoulder as he takes up his task and shoulders the responsibility that this noble buildings puts upon him," said Melvin Adams at the dedication.²²⁷ The Memorial Hall thus resembles another aspect of Stanford White's work at New York University, the colonnade behind the Gould Library that he designed as a Hall of Fame for great Americans in 1901 (Fig. 91).²²⁸ That Dartmouth's administrators found it necessary to devote a building to this purpose and create a sort of year-round Dartmouth Night shows how seriously they took the challenge of preserving college spirit. The College held a certain attitude to history: by recalling the past through the sanctification of alumni, the College could hold onto a sense of college even as the school took on the elements of a university.

The Quadrangle never emerged as Rich intended it. The Lord House stayed in front of the Museum and became the College administration building, and the College did not even buy the adjacent Leeds House until 1910, and it too remained.²²⁹ The Quadrangle differs from Rich's later works because it was his first project at the College. Styles also changed. But financial limits of the College, possibly relating to the national economic crisis of the 1890s, also explain the fate of the Quadrangle and the change in overall sensibility. The affluence of the late 1880s began to slow in 1892, and by 1893 a major depression had taken hold of the country, causing a general building slowdown and tougher times for architects. The depression would last the rest of the decade.²³⁰ Among schools, the economic downturn hit rural New England colleges the hardest.²³¹ In 1884 Dartmouth's entering class dropped from 120 to 103, which some blame on the depression, though enrollment rose again the next year.²³²

College construction after the Quadrangle was more sensitive to the traditions of the campus than before. Perhaps the administration had learned a lesson about overambitious planning; economics obviously ruled the whole project and controlled aesthetic decisions. Administration Row's sensitivity may come as much from financial constraints as thoughtful planning. Just as budget limits and individual sellers foiled the College at the Quadrangle, they forced it to expand Administration Row in a piecemeal pattern. Rich left the steps of the 1871 Balch House in place after it burned, not necessarily because he was mindful of history but because incorporating the old steps into the porch of College Hall would save money. One wonders what Rich's original master plan for the College looked like, whether it perhaps proposed Quadrangles for all four sides of the Green as part of a thoroughgoing blank-slate approach.

Rich would essentially end his tenure at Dartmouth with Robinson Hall, whose designs the Boston Evening Transcript printed in 1912. In 1915 the College hired Parker, Thomas & Rice to design a replacement for College Hall with a larger dining hall to accommodate the larger student population. Lockwood, Greene & Co. designed the new the Storehouse adjacent the Heating Plant that rose in 1915.²³³ The College called on Rich in 1917 for one last project, the Spaulding Pool addition that his gymnasium had always anticipated, but the First World War delayed the project. The new president kindly declined Rich's offers to further the plans for a library, work Rich had begun in 1911-14.²³⁴ Ernest Martin Hopkins (1877-1961), who took over from Nichols in 1916, favored an architect who would live in Hanover and oversee the College expansion full-time. Hopkins's administration hired Jens Frederick Larson, who formed a partnership with Harry A. Wells, the Superintendent of Buildings and Grounds.

The College built Rich's pool when war shortages ended in 1919-20, with Harry Wells supervising the work. At the same time Larson & Wells were erecting the large Topliff dormitory across the street from the Gymnasium, beginning a new period of College growth in which Larson would design even more buildings than Rich had. Most prominent among them would be a library, a building that Rich had long proposed should stand on the site of his own Butterfield Museum. The Museum did not move to a new location as Rich hoped but fell in 1928,²³⁵ making it the only major building by Charles Rich no longer standing at Dartmouth. As it crumbled the Museum revealed behind it the new Baker Library (1927-8), whose arms mimic the Quadrangle at a larger scale (Fig. 100).

The College celebrated Rich's work, and students dedicated a volume of the Aegis to him. Rich also reached out to students writing an article in The Dartmouth on how a young man might go about becoming an architect.²³⁶ President Tucker said at the dedication of Webster, "would that he were here to recognize and acknowledge this universal sense of satisfaction in his work."²³⁷ Rich thanked his patron for a favorable report to the alumni in 1909:

It is a pleasure to feel that the work one has done is satisfactory and I can assure you that no part of my professional career has given greater pleasure and satisfaction than the work directed by you, and whose success was so largely due to your good judgment and study. I cannot thank you enough for this pleasure.

Later that year Rich designed a simple white house for Tucker across from the Ridge House on Occom Ridge, refusing to accept any fees for the work. Tucker sent Rich an antique book of architectural prints instead of payment.²³⁸

Rich had helped usher in the New Dartmouth in a period that many described as a renaissance (Fig. 101). Though the College had changed, and despite Rich's false start, the transition was a sensitive one. Dartmouth had almost all of the new facilities it needed and had become a leading school in the nation, regaining a position many saw it as having lost in the nineteenth century. Rich's buildings formed an apt match to Tucker's reforms. By safeguarding "Dartmouth democracy" and "college spirit," the new buildings helped mesh the modern university into the traditional college, even as the institution was reluctant to acknowledge what it was becoming.