Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/1997/11/19/one_mill_55_million.php
Wednesday, November 19, 1997
The architect Robert Venturi submitted final plans last week for the construction of Berry Library, the $55 million extension to Baker Library funded in large part by the gift of John Berry '44. The blueprints elicited an official objection from the Faculty Design Review Committee, the group charged with overseeing construction projects on the College's campus.
The committee's objections stem from the nature of the design. Venturi has consciously modeled his plans after the design tradition of the New England factory, a style known by critics as 'mill architecture.'
The designs call for a 290-foot facade stretching across the Northern face of Baker, unbroken save for a small bend about one-third of the way across the wall, going from west to east. The building will be uniform, and will have rectangular and regular windows at regular intervals. Venturi has made provisions for a free-standing granite arcade in order to help compensate for the uniformity of the Library. The arcade is essentially a thirty-foot high post-modern statue, running the entire length of the building.
The Western third of the building will house an academic center, and the Eastern two-thirds a library. Kiewit Computation Center, and Gerry and Bradley Halls will be paved over in order to make room for Berry's construction. No provision is made for space between the main body of Baker and the new Berry Library. Berry's mass is therefore stacked on to Baker's.
The Design Review Committee originally objected to the preliminary plans last June, but the final designs, submitted last week, indicate Venturi made only slight changes.
'One thing that's particularly noticeable about the architecture of this campus is its flexibility,' said Art History Professor Joy Kenseth, who has led faculty opposition to the plans for Berry. 'I've noticed all over campus that there are very few places where there isn't a lot of green space between buildings. I think that is important because it suggests that the brick and the mortar isn't dominating the whole area, it's comfortably integrated with nature. The new building takes us away from that. There are two big parts to this building [the proposed combination of Baker and Berry], this mass and then this long section that runs 290 feet [Berry]. There's no other building on campus that has a facade that long. That's as long, practically, as the football field. And it is compacted, pressed right up against the rest of Baker and against Carpenter. So here you don't have what happens everywhere else, a kind of generous opening that gives a flexible air to the building.'
The design of Berry is offensive to the Design Review Committee not only because of the monumentality of its size but because of the statement mill architecture makes. According to Art History Professor Robert McGrath, who has sat on the Design Review Committee since its inception in 1984, the Berry design invokes images of large-scale industrial production not appropriate for a rustic liberal arts College.
'This [design] speaks to mechanization, this speaks to production,' said Professor McGrath. 'It speaks to everything that the factory stands for. The college can do one of two things. It can rewrite the rhetoric of the catalogue which is grounded in humanistic, liberal studies kind of rhetoric. Or it can abandon that and claim that this is a school for producing, mass produced commodities. If it is going to embrace this aesthetic then it has got to abandon the rhetoric of liberal arts studies. The library should speak to individuals. It should speak to the role of individual. This thing is not in a human scale as are the rest of the buildings around here. This is not a library. It wants to have some diversity, originality, something that speaks to the notion of the liberating qualities of liberal arts education. I see this as heavy, oppressive.'
The administration has had in place for the better part of the last decade outlines for the construction of a 'North Campus,' a campus extension that will include a second green to the North of Baker, and buildings to frame it. According to Assistant Professor of Psychology Todd Heatherton, there is considerable sentiment amongst the faculty (who have been most immediately privy to the design plans) that the new building looks 'more like the back of Baker than the front of Berry.' Given the centrality that Berry would assume under such a plan (it would front the North green the way Baker fronts the present green), the designs imply a highly understated, and, to McGrath, architecturally disappointing, North campus.
'Any future [Northern] development will have to respond to this[Berry],' he said. 'If this aesthetic stands then the rest of the buildings up in the North are going to have to adapt that whole aesthetic and I don't think that's the aesthetic Dartmouth wants to communicate. Architectural expression has to be congruent with the purposes of the institutions. I don't like the building on that count as well as that it tends to set up a barrier; it looks like a big plow.'
There are nine members of the Design Review Committee. There was, according to McGrath, 'a vast consensus' on the committee that the initial proposals did not pass aesthetic muster. That consensus has remained intact to oppose the revision on similar grounds. According to other sources, only one committee member, Economics Professor Mark Getter, made arguments in favor of the design.
The source of the aesthetic objection to the proposals for Berry has not been limited to the faculty.
'Berry Library looks like something you'd want to run into and throw a stick of dynamite,' said John Webb '01. 'Architecture like this is the reason I didn't go to a University of California state school.'
Will Lamson '00 agreed. 'We don't want our campus to turn into Cornell,' he said. 'This building is as ugly as sin.'
Mr. Berry, the millionaire Missouri industrialist who has underwritten the project, has consistently reiterated his favor for a groundbreaking in the spring of 1998. Given that timetable, and the present unwillingness of the administration to subject the project to further review, it seems likely that the objections of the faculty will be paved over, along with Gerry, Bradley, and Kiewit.
Last Spring, the administration took the unprecedented step of asking the Design Review Committee to recommend two architects for the Berry project. The committee recommended Venturi and Robert Stern, the architect responsible for the new psychology building. President Freedman then selected Venturi. This is a precedent in the Committee's history; the Design Review Committee has always been empowered to select the architect itself.
According to McGrath, the Design Review Committee also had less involvement with the Berry design throughout its development than it has had with any other recent project. The administration took over much of the authority the Design Review Committee had traditionally enjoyed.
Coming on the heels of the fiasco over regulatory violations in the appointment of Jim Wright as Provost, President Freedman's subversion of the traditional role of the Design Review Committee raises some critical questions about his willingness to circumscribe tradition, practice, and his own regulations in order to leave the College the way he wants it.
President Freedman retains the confidence of the vast majority of the faculty. The demolition of Gerry and Bradley leaves the Math Department without a home.
'One of the things that they're going to loose if they knock this down is Filene Auditorium,' said Math Professor Jim Baumgartner. 'Filene is something that's important not just to math but also to psychology and a lot of other things, computer science for example. And there is an auditorium in the basement of the new psychology building that they claim is pretty much the same as Filene. Well, I think it would be better to have it in a math building than to have it in a psychology building.'
Professor Baumgartner also expressed concern at the dispersion of Math department offices. Currently, some offices are in Bradley Hall and some are in the Choate House. The demolition of Bradley would leave the Department without a central home. The Board of Trustees as yet to lend its approval to the specifics of the project, and it retains final authority to approve them.
'If the Board of Trustees overlooks the concerns of the Design Review Committee and goes ahead with the project as it is planned,' said Professor Kenseth, 'it will be a sad day.'