Hanover Plain Dispatch: North Campus

By Joseph Rago | Friday, March 11, 2005

Editor's Note: The following article is primarily factual. Readers interested in analysis, reflection, and editorial judgment will find it appended to the text as annotation.

Facilities Planning Office

— At left, Kemeny-Haldeman Hall, future home of the mathematics department, and, at right, a study lounge at the top of Kemeny Tower. —

One-hundred and one years ago this February, Dartmouth Hall was gutted by fire. The building was the last original piece of architecture connecting the College to its founding years.

This winter, the College broke ground for its North Campus expansion. New dormitories will line Maynard Street, a new dining hall is set for construction, and new academic buildings will go up as well. Two new dorms are already underway on Tuck Mall. The engineering school will gain a new wing, and the gym will be overhauled and vastly expanded. The South Block of Main Street is set for demolition and modernization. A new arts facility will be raised behind the Hopkins Center. The changes will take at least a decade and profoundly shape the Dartmouth experience for generations. The steam-shovels are a constant presence and the stir of construction is unmistakable. This is a terribly important moment in Dartmouth's history.

The most significant change is the continuing evolution of Dartmouth's North Campus, the area behind Baker Library that the College has gradually developed since the mid-to-late eighties, most notably with Berry Library, completed in 2002, and the Moore Psychology building, which opened in 1999. Dartmouth recently broke ground on the second phase of the North Campus, which includes six dormitories on the corner of Maynard Street and College Street and a new academic facility along North Main Street to house the Math Departments and the College interdisciplinary institutes (the John Sloan Dickey Center, the Ethics Institute, and the Leslie Center for the Humanities). The building is to be named in honor of John G. Kemeny, Dartmouth's thirteenth President, and Charles E. Haldeman '70, whose ten-million dollar gift made the center possible. The Gerry-Bradley buildings, which currently block half of Berry's fa�ade, are set to be pulled down as soon as Kemeny is ready for occupancy.

The need for more housing at Dartmouth has been evident for years. "The reality is that there is a demonstrated need for more on-campus housing," Dean of Residential Life Martin Redman said. "We've known we've had issues with overcrowding and infrastructure for some time." Many dormitory rooms are overcrowded—O.R.L. has been assigning rooms triples that should be doubles, doubles that should be singles.{1}

About sixteen per cent of students currently live off campus. There were growing concerns about students living off-campus, Dean Redman said, but, "We don't want to house all students." Many underclassmen live off-campus either because they think they won't be able to get housing, especially as sophomores (who have the lowest housing priority) or because they actually couldn't get housing. Under the current construction plans, the College will build enough residencies to fully accommodate ninety per cent of the student body with no waitlists for rooming.

The North Campus dorms are named in honor David T. McLaughlin '54, Dartmouth's fourteenth President. They will house 342 students and comprise six buildings, grouped into two U-orientations similar to Ripley-Woodward-Smith. The individual buildings will be linked by connectors containing study rooms, kitchens, and lounges, and will be almost transparent, with the spaces inside glass-enclosed. The two groupings will face each other and form a cloistral enclave between them; architecturally, the McLaughlin cluster is a sort of modern take on an Oxford-style quadrangle. The entire first floor of one McLaughlin dorm will be devoted to public space, with a large shared common area for social events, lectures, and dinners. Moore Ruble Yudell, out of Santa Monica, in association with Cambridge-based Bruner/Cott, designed the buildings.

The McLaughlin dorms have been in the works for a long time, and were originally planned to open sometime in 2004. "Circumstance beyond our control forced the postponement of construction," Dean Redman said, citing issues of College financing (it costs the College about $130,000 for each individual 'bed' it builds) and "local-political issues," including problems with Hanover zoning, and the criticisms of home-owners along Rope Ferry Road. The dorms were originally much larger and more massive, and were scheduled to house more than five-hundred students. The plans were dialed back because of issues of scale and the desire to keep the small-town residential feel of Hanover.

Facilities Planning Office

— One of the McLaughlin Cluster's social spaces. —

Dean Redman characterized the architecture of the dorms as "absolutely fantastic." "We learned from our mistakes in East Wheelock," he said. Planners consciously rejected "too modern a style," he said, with many proposals for buildings that were "not cut out for Dartmouth's architecture." Instead, planners chose a style that incorporated the elements of classic Dartmouth—copper roofing, brick exteriors, granite masonry, and woodwork and trim with lumber from the Second College Grant, for instance—with more modern elements of design. The College Master Planner Lo-Yi Chan '54 recently commented, "We're guided in our building by two simple, interlocking principles. First, we preserve what is Dartmouth—its intimate spaces, its historic structures, its sacred grounds. Second, we connect new and old through conscious use of class architectural details. In doing so, we aim to give students and faculty what Dartmouth has always provided—the finest environment for fostering discovery, learning, and growth."

Because the McLaughlin plans were significantly scaled back, a design for two Tuck Mall buildings was expedited. These dorms will face the Gold Coast dorms and abut the Butterfield and Russell Sage dormitories. They are connected by a large glass atrium that will include social and communal spaces like those in the McLaughlin cluster. Each building uses a mini-mansard to imply that its top level is part of the roof, effectively disguising a fifth-story to blend in with the current architecture of Tuck Mall. The construction has permanently closed Old Tuck Drive connecting Webster Avenue to Tuck Mall. The dormitories, not yet formally named, will comprise mixed housing of about 160 beds, a combination of singles, two-room doubles, and several upperclassman suites. They were designed by Atkin Olshin Lawrence-Bell, the same firm that designed the Collis Center addition and McCulloch Hall, the five-story addition to East-Wheelock.{2}

Broadly, the McLaughlin and Tuck Mall dorms are designed with two interlocked purposes in mind. They need to accommodate the needs of freshmen and sophomores, with areas designed to aid social interaction and build relationships. This largely means space to hold social events. They also need to attract older students whose social networks are largely established, so there are suite-style rooms reserved for groups of upperclassmen.

From Dean Redman's perspective, the point of the "traditional College" from a residential standpoint was to provide "as much diversity of choice and option and opportunity as possible." He explained that one of Dartmouth's strengths as a residential college was that it allowed students "to communicate and connect," that the living environment here was more than a storage facility for bodies. The new dorms on Tuck Mall and Maynard Street are set up to "facilitate this interaction," Dean Redman said, envisioning concentric spheres of "decreasingly public experiences," extended from the common spaces on the first floors to the private individual rooms.

The new dormitories on Tuck Mall and the North Campus will address the overcrowding issues—O.R.L. will begin decompressing the residencies of the older buildings, returning them to their original numbers. The office will also begin to overhaul the physical plant, tearing out rooms in columns to make way for fire stairs, and begin to convert some rooms to study and community space. The plan will move forward in installments, with each new building creating the opportunity to close and renovate an older one. The plan also allows for the progressive demolition of the Choate and River cluster over the next five to ten years.{3}

The McLaughlin and Tuck Mall buildings will ideally open sometime in 2006. That will allow the College to embark on an ambitious program of renovation and restoration for most of Dartmouth's other dormitories, which will extend through 2015. More kitchens and lounge space will be added to every floor, while dorms will be brought into compliance with fire and A.D.A. regulations. The first building to be overhauled will be Hitchcock, which will probably be reconfigured with large suites targeted to upperclassmen. Though these projects are still in the conceptual and planning stages, possible College building includes building more apartments by the River cluster; perhaps a modest addition to Wheeler; finishing the remaining work on Brace Commons at East Wheelock, which was put off because of a financial crimp; and renovations to Mass Row along the lines of those planned for Hitchcock. Crowding in the Gold Coast dorms will be almost immediately relieved with the opening of the North Campus.

Facilities Planning Office

— A McLaughlin Cluster common area. —

What will the North Campus look like? It will be dominated by Berry Library.{4} The Kemeny-Haldeman building will have two mirror-image entrances along Main Street, one leading into Kemeny and the other into Haldeman, in a similar fashion as the fusion of Berry with the Carson academic wing, which houses the History department. On the other side, the one facing the North Campus, there will be a wing extending east, ending in a large tower. Though it is difficult to tell now, Gerry-Bradley sits in a ravine. The North Campus architecture will landscape this into a tiered well that will be cut up by pathways and planted with gardens. The tiers will radiate out from Kemeny Tower like ripples in a pond. Because the North Campus shifts to the east (whereas the Green is oriented to the compass), the lay of the land will redirect traffic towards a long pedestrian mall, extending to Maynard Street, that is being called the 'Berry Ramble' or 'Second Green.' Trees will be planted along the east side of the North Campus to disguise the backs of the buildings along College Street.

The North Campus will be anchored by a new dining hall set back from Maynard street by a lawn. In rough sketches it seemed similar in appearance to a large A-frame hunting lodge made of glass, brick, and steel. It is fronted by curved colonnade that will include outdoor dining spaces. Naturalistic plantings will line the edges of lawn, including what will become several rows of large trees. The workups on the dining hall were not available for publication as we went to press. Plans are also in place for a major renovation to Thayer Dining Hall, though they are still embryonic.{5}

Facilities Planning Office

— The McLaughlin Cluster as viewed from the southwest. A rudimentary rendering of the new dining hall is at left. —

Notes

{1} Dartmouth's residential facilities, while adequate, generally fall below the standard at other comparable institutions. Many of Dartmouth's rooms amount to little more than overcrowded barracks.

{2} I think Dean Redman is absolutely correct from an aesthetic perspective in comparing these buildings to the "mistakes" of East Wheelock, though he was mainly referring to issues of layout and planning of the interiors. (The E.W. buildings, for example, have sinks in the hallways.) East Wheelock is wrong for the context of the North Campus—too large, too hodgepodge. There are angles jutting out every which-way in East Wheelock's composition, with little sense of balance or formality. It looks like they loaded a bunch of windows into a catapult and just launched them at a fa�ade, and wherever they ended up, so be it. Though the McLaughlin buildings incorporate modern elements, they are also restrained—the windows orderly, in rows and constructed with smaller panes.

The Tuck Mall buildings recall John Russell Pope's master plan for College architecture, drafted in 1923, which called for a line of buildings along the north side of Tuck Mall similar to the Gold Coast dormitories, connected by arched openings. The common space connecting the two new dorms is in some ways a modern version of the same. Russell-Sage and Butterfield were built in line with Pope's proposals but his plan was tabled for financial reasons. The Tuck Mall buildings seem somewhat out of character with the rest of Tuck Mall, but then, architecture like that simply can't be built in the current age. The incongruence will be jarring at first, but I suspect people will grow accustomed to it. Given the circumstances, I find them an acceptable balance of old and new.

{3} These buildings, like Gerry-Bradley (the 'Shower Towers'), have long been overdue for the wrecking ball, and not only from an aesthetic standpoint. They were obsolete almost as soon as they were built, sloppily designed and executed.

{4} It is unfortunate the Berry will anchor the space created by the North Campus expansion—undeniably, it will dominate it. It is extremely long (longer than a football field) and ungainly. It is an exercise in dreary mediocrity, toying with the commercial vernacular and elevating the tacky and the cheap and the supergraphic joke. But, sad to say, Berry is here to stay. So we had better get used to it.

{5} I think many are concerned about a North-South split to the campus or a de-emphasis of the Green as the center of campus. I think these concerns are somewhat misplaced. The campus is growing larger architecturally, but it is also growing more diffuse, with students spread over a greater space. There are no academic buildings north of Moore. From an architectural standpoint, the good thing about the North Campus is that it will not impinge on Dartmouth's essential aesthetic quality, which is of course centered in the classical buildings about the Green. The McLaughlin and Tuck Mall buildings are not masterpieces, but then, they are also college dorms. They are also conservative for modern architecture, unobjectionable. Students will like living in them.

Many are also concerned that the North Campus will pave the way to an increased student population. I honestly do not think there are current plans to put that in place. O.R.L. has plans to build over a thousand new beds, but there will only be a net gain of 225 when all is said and done. I think the North Campus, in the end, will probably make for a stronger campus.

Hanover Plain Dispatch: North Campus

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