10 Feet Off: Mistakes Everyone Really Shouldn’t Make

The College on the Hill: a phrase echoed in tribute by generations. It’s an ode to an academic tradition inseparable from its setting, a story of fathers shipping their sons and daughters off to the rigid North to study the arts and sciences—a reality often supplanted by alcohol and revelry—only to find their offspring returned with New Hampshire granite in the place of their brains and a job offer from Goldman Sachs.

Now, imagine that hill has a hole in it, and that hole as a surprising lack of college within it.

On June 27, Dartmouth administration announced that it would be temporarily suspending construction on the $200 million expansion of the Thayer School of Engineering, a new building which would house a 340-car parking garage, a relocated computer science department, and the new Magnuson Center for Entrepreneurship. The reason is truly ironic; seemingly, nobody on the construction site possessed enough engineering expertise to figure out the intricacies of operating a tape measure. The 70-foot-deep hole was dug a staggering 10.8 feet off center, and the blunder wasn’t even realized until they took measurements trying to place a new tower crane. This faced the College with a choice: either amend the plans or remove the steel lining and re-dig the hole.

The administration has since announced that it intends upon redrawing the blueprints to accommodate for the new, off-centered positioning, but that option comes with its own variety of problems. Aside from necessary lighting and landscaping readjustments, the new building was designed to have a pedestrian bridge attaching it to existing MacLean, and so working out how to extend the walkway by a whole ten feet will be difficult from both an engineering and an aesthetic standpoint. To make matters worse, snapshots of the design concept seemed to feature the resultant overpass as one of the West End’s most distinguished features, and so the pressure to assure that it’s visually appealing is tremendous. Unfortunately, the College already has a record of experimenting with lanky glass tunnels, and so prospects of success are dubious. Nonetheless, the decision to move the foundation was approved by the Town of Hanover relatively quickly, but considering the time needed to adjust the design and accommodate for the new placement, it’s still bound to cause a substantial delay.

According to Turner Construction, who was hired to manage the projec t, the problem originated in a surveying error committed by one of their contractors. “[The] baseline control was provided by a licensed surveyor who has experience on the Dartmouth College campus,” said Meaghan Hooper-Berdik, general manager of the New York-based construction firm. “Turner Construction and its subcontractors, along with the design consultants, are working with Dartmouth College to determine the best path forward.”

Altogether, it seems as though somebody who makes a living on taking measurements just miserably failed at their own specialty. Regardless, the fact that this mistake wasn’t realized until they had excavated a 340-car parking garage’s worth of soil is pitiful in itself, and so Turner’s on-site managers certainly aren’t without blame. In spite of it being a hilariously fitting mishap—rudimentary math problems getting in the way of properly placing an engineering building—it leaves students and faculty hoping that access to the new facility won’t be delayed all too substantially, and unfortunately, the magnitude of the delay is still up in the air.

 “In the coming weeks, we expect to have a better understanding of how this development could affect the College financially as well as the effect on the overall project schedule,” wrote College spokeswoman Diana Lawrence in response to the incident. For the time being, the Campus Services website still lists the completion date as Summer 2020, but unless the College and their contractors are able to straighten out their measurement methodology before progress continues, there’s no reason to expect that there won’t be any more delays.

College administration also claims to be working to “ensure the financial impact to Dartmouth is minimized,” but the supposition that they would pay any price for this incident is frankly ridiculous. These financial consequences won’t just be swallowed up by some institutional wormhole; they’ll come out of donors’ pockets, money gifted to the college and squandered as a consequence of their delegation of project management to somebody incapable of counting to ten. With substantial amounts of capital recently amassed during the Call to Lead campaign, donors and students alike are left to hope that these mistakes will not be repeated or otherwise alumni contributions might continue to drop below their already pitiful levels.

This failure is unfortunately symptomatic of much broader institutional problems concerning Dartmouth’s architectural planning. Whereas at a glance, many of the present issues seem attributable to the College’s Planning, Design, and Construction office, much of their work is actually predetermined by a more potent force: Dartmouth’s Strategic Master Plan. Proudly lead by President Philip J. Hanlon, the outline has already pre-picked consultants and architectural firms for the College’s future projects, and they’ve hardly stuck to their stated objectives. For instance, the very first “parameter” listed amongst their guidelines is “protecting the campus character.” Unless President Hanlon’s conception of Dartmouth’s characteristic architectural style is that of River Cluster and the Choates, these firms would have been banished from Hanover much before they started digging any holes. The new Dana Library and graduate student lounge is perhaps the best example, and preliminary renderings of the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Societydon’t suggest a much brighter future. To make matters worse, the concept layouts for a new residence hall next to the Alumni Gym would be more fitting for the centerfold of a Soviet architecture magazine. Given that college planners had consciously approved such abysmal aesthetic proposals, especially considering the recipe for success in Hanover is as simple as brick rectangles with green shutters, it shouldn’t have been surprising that they forgot where they were supposed to be digging. Truthfully, it wouldn’t be even shocking if they tried to measure the distance with a ruler.

Fundamentally, Dartmouth is a small college with a considerable endowment; it makes much more sense to have small, beautiful spaces than massive modern graduate student lounges.

Unfortunately, this new building has more design flaws than its foundation being dug ten feet too far to the south. Whereas it would be appropriate for the new engineering and computer science center to be one of campus’ more modern-looking buildings, the College’s strange romance with out-of-place mash-ups of brick and glass needs desperately to be put to an end. 3D renderings of the center posted on the Campus Services website reveal an architectural style that is vastly out of place in Hanover’s quaint setting; the only feature that resembles the rest of campus is a couple of brick walls, and that makes it easily to suppose that the College’s only qualification for “fitting in” is that it includes some sort of red-tinted masonry. Dartmouth Administration ought to realize the foolishness of this mentality before they do legitimate damage to the College’s long-established neo-Georgian image. Consider a university such as Duke: it’s less than half as old as Dartmouth and has constructed its campus to appear arguably older, and that’s paid off in the rankings. Students come to Hanover for its quaint New England setting; if they want modern architecture engraved into their corneas, they’re going to choose a school that can offer more concrete walls and glass façades than Dartmouth will ever be able to. Essentially, Hanlon and his team are at risk of putting the College into an architectural class it can’t compete with, all while other schools are trying to desperately take Dartmouth’s spot.

Altogether, between misplaced holes and aesthetic atrocities, it’s evident that whoever is truly managing Dartmouth’s development and planning process is downright incompetent when it comes to the effective expansion of campus and its academic capacity. Obvious, avoidable errors have already been made, and entirely new mistakes will begin to stick out increasingly as popular architectural styles inevitably change from decade to decade. Of course, this wouldn’t be unprecedented; from the Hopkins Center to the River Cluster, parts of campus still shine as unadulterated examples of a 60s décor which has since become vastly outdated, and the College is shamelessly repeating that same mistake. Fundamentally, Dartmouth is a small college with a considerable endowment; it makes much more sense to have small, beautiful spaces than massive modern graduate student lounges. Considering President Hanlon’s past objective to increase undergraduate enrollment, alongside the current planned expansion of graduate schools, this outlook on campus expansion shouldn’t be surprising, being unquestionably linked with a radically controversial image of Dartmouth’s future as an institution.

Between faulty bureaucratic oversight and questionable future architectural objectives, there are evidently many more extant issues than just a misplaced hole. At the least, the president’s office should be held accountable for the shortcomings of its so-esteemed Strategic Master Plan before donors can no longer recognize the setting of some of their most memorable years. Plus, the Planning and Development office deserves to be held under a critical lens for their project oversight, or apparently whatever lack thereof, so that their already lackluster ambitions don’t end up turning into capital sinkholes. Still, in all this criticism, it’s important to recognize that change is inevitable; Dartmouth is and will always be an institution that changes and evolves with the times, but the current path forward certainly isn’t one that serves its best interests. Surely, it doesn’t follow that one of New England’s most characteristic academic institutions should reasonably be drifting away from that very charm that made it great in the first place, and that character will quickly fade unless some substantial change is made to protect it.