Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/05/05/the_architecture_of_dartmouth_our_history_across_the_landscape.php
Monday, May 5, 2008
Dartmouth ranks among the oldest colleges in America, and the deep sense of history and loyalty shared by alumni for their College over the centuries reflects this. Yet in terms of physical buildings, little remains that connects the students of today with Eleazar Wheelock’s wooden college. Much of the College’s architecture is divided into distinct phases that align not so much with contemporaneous work at other colleges, but rather with the tenor of particular architects whom the College employed and who, together with the President of the College, produced a body of work that shows an evolution in the design of Dartmouth. Indeed, for anyone who has spent four years at the College, the fact that Dartmouth wasn’t built in a day is clearly obvious. It is our goal here to present a segmented chronology of construction at Dartmouth in a way that shows the evolution of the College in several key aspects.
In the Beginning
In late eighteenth century Hanover, local craftsmen were toiling hard to construct the original Dartmouth Hall. Eleazar Wheelock, who nearly copied Dartmouth’s Charter from Princeton’s verbatim, also found inspiration in Princeton’s Nassau Hall when he drew up the plan for Dartmouth Hall. At the time, Wheelock was concerned about attracting elite students to a college located in the wilderness. To offset the primitive surroundings, Wheelock refined Dartmouth’s character by erecting the stately and Georgian Dartmouth Hall. At the time, Dartmouth Hall contained the entire college within its walls, from classrooms, to professors’ offices, to sleeping quarters.
Dormitories
As the College grew throughout the nineteenth century, the first additions to Dartmouth’s architectural landscape were two more dorms: Wentworth Hall and Thornton Hall, originally unpainted brick. Then, in 1838, the more elegant Reed Hall was put up. These three buildings were designed by Ammi B. Young, the College’s first official architect or professional designer.
Of all the facilities on campus, the dormitories exemplify the slow and methodical changes that architects and administrators implemented over a long course of trial-and-error. Barely any examples of nineteenth-century dormitories survive, besides the significantly remodeled Dartmouth, Thornton and Wentworth Halls, whose roles have changed entirely since their original completion. Perhaps the most important reason for the lack of more historic dorms is that they never existed in the first place. Prior to Reverend William J. Tucker’s administration many students, if not most, lived “off campus” in Hanover apartments, which exacerbated already obvious economic divides between students.
Thus, the founding theme for the design of Dartmouth’s dormitories was “democracy”—a theme central to Scott Meacham ’95’s seminal thesis on Dartmouth architecture: democracy as an attempt to ensure a proper mingling of students to ensure cliques did not arise on the basis of wealth and background, but rather upon mutual interests and goals. In his spare time, Meacham ’95 maintains the website www.Dartmo.com. The site is the most comprehensive catalog of Dartmouth’s buildings, both historical and contemporary, currently available.
The dormitory aesthetic, as well as much of Dartmouth’s aesthetic, can be attributed to Charles Alonzo Rich ‘1875, who, as Rev. Tucker said, “refounded” the College and gave that new College a distinct look.
Back to the Roots: the Neo-Colonial Revival
During this period in American history, the nation was also “refounding” itself, and this was reflected in the architecture of the time. When Rich was working to give the College a new look, the nation was just emerging from the very divisive civil war. In 1876, however, the north and south put the memory of the war behind them and celebrated the nation’s centennial. As the nation looked back to 1776 and the inception of the nation, a celebration of the founding ideals led to a revival of colonial architecture. During the eighteenth century, the colonial style of architecture, also known as Georgian architecture, emphasized heavy moldings, a boxy design, and classical details and flourishes—like columns and pediments. Dartmouth Hall, originally erected between 1784-1791, is quintessentially Georgian. Like many architects of the post-Civil War era, Rich, in his designs for Dartmouth buildings, looked back to the Georgian era for his architectural cues. Late nineteenth century America was celebrating a colonial revival in architecture, and the celebration is still evident today on Dartmouth’s campus.
Rich’s first building was also his first dormitory, Richardson Hall. Richardson, completed in 1898, actually represents more of an aberration from Rich’s later work than a new standard as it combines many quintessentially New England styles and materials in a manner that foreshadows the colonial style, but does not represent it. The heavy use of limestone, the circular front portico, and even the large scale of Richardson all serve to separate it from later dormitories. The dorm’s importance is not only evident in its thick moldings and rich design, but also in its positioning: it is located atop a little hill, so that its inhabitants overlook those below them.
Fayerweather Hall followed the next year and was strategically set back from Dartmouth Hall while mimicking it in style, though switching to red brick from the white plaster, in order to parallel the main building and to be hidden from view from any visitor on the Green. Certain key changes were made in Fayerweather, most crucial of which was the beginning of the change from majority-single rooms to doubles and triples. This was an effort to further integrate students who lived in the dormitories. Rich would follow Fayerweather with its North and South additions, with Massachusetts Hall, which was modeled on the colonial dorms at Yale and Harvard, Wheeler Hall, New Hampshire Hall, and Hitchcock Hall. Other additions in subsequent Rich buildings include lounges that the administration intended to be centers of intellectual conversation that would create a space for the co-mingling of students. This idea of creating a shared learning and intellectual space would become another key goal in dormitory construction and would continue to have mixed results.
Hopkins elected to appoint Jens Frederick Larson to replace Rich as overseer of campus expansion and Larson went on to define much of the inter-World War period architecture. The great achievement during this period was the 1928 Gold Coast cluster, which earned its name thanks to the expense it took to build during the depths of the Great Depression. Ripley-Woodward-Smith, named for three of the earliest tutors at the College, was also erected during this era and represents an attempt at integrating separate dormitories and also creating a common space in front. Russell Sage Hall represents an experiment with a larger type of dormitory, this time with a full-fledged fourth floor, but maintains much of the style and materials as the Gold Coast, making the buildings complementary.
The East Wheelock Travesty
The most serious attempt at rethinking dormitories came in the late 1980s in the form of the East Wheelock Cluster. Intended as modern interpretations of the residential colleges at Harvard and Yale, which fostered intense community loyalty and both facilitated and un-facilitated intellectual discussion, the three buildings of East Wheelock—Andres, Zimmerman, and Morton—all failed to live up to the administration’s expectations. In form, they fostered too much of “the lonely acts of writing poetry… or translating Catullus,” because of a lack of communal space on the floors and the failure of Brace Commons, the underground meeting area connected to each of the dorms, to foster student interaction.
In style, East Wheelock adopted a post-modern design whose saving grace is that they were placed far enough from the center of campus as to prevent one from drawing immediate and disdainful comparisons. The design of the cluster takes the basics of the Dartmouth aesthetic and bastardizes it in a way that makes the elements seem foreign, not familiar; take, for example, the windows, which are large and modern, echoed later in buildings like Berry, as opposed to the traditional colonial-style windows of the rest of campus.
The construction of McCulloch fifteen years later attempted to repair many of the design flaws of East Wheelock, by opening up bathroom space to facilitate interaction and removing spring hinges on doors to make closing oneself into one’s dorm a conscious anti-social decision. Though superior in many aspects to the rest of the cluster, McCulloch has still fallen far short of its expectations to create an intellectual community at Dartmouth, while continuing to foster a world apart from the rest of campus.
Administrative Row
At the turn of the last century, none of the row of buildings from Collis to Parkhurst had yet been built, and the west side of the Green was private property dominated by several Victorian mansions. In a decade’s time, the boulevard, then known as North Main Street, would be reborn as the administrative heart of Dartmouth. This reflected the trend, under President Tucker, away from a college that could be run from a few administrative offices scattered around the campus in different buildings, and into a modern university-style school that required central offices for students and administrators. In short, this represented the spawning of the university-as-bureaucracy.
The first building to be erected was College Hall (1901)—today Collis—that was designed to function as a new center for campus life. College Hall included several things that helped make it a new center of campus, such as a dining hall, dormitories on the upper levels, “the Commons”, and various office spaces for students. Over the years College Hall would change substantially with the renovation of the top floors from dormitory space into more office space, the conversion of the lower level from a kitchen to include space for a bar, and the redesign that incorporates the atrium most students and alumni are familiar with today. College Hall and Collis Center have largely been seen as a success on the part of the college to create a common space for students from different parts of campus to have meetings, hold events, and meet publicly.
Tuck Hall (1902-1904), original home of the Tuck School of Business, now named McNutt Hall, came a year later and followed the design of College Hall. Tuck (McNutt) did not incorporate wood along its corners as College Hall (Collis) did; also, Tuck (McNutt) lacked the classical portico that has come to define College Hall (Collis). Tuck would set the standard for the rest of administrative row. The original design had several interesting aspects that are no longer present, such as the attic level that had been left vacant, which the school filled with a commercial museum of different artifacts it garnered from alumni and donors. The façade was updated in 1920 and the building fully renovated in 1930 when the Tuck School moved to the western edge of campus and the College turned the building into McNutt.
Lewis Parkhurst’s gift would make possible the construction of the first building dedicated to the administration at the northeast corner of the Green, Parkhurst Hall. The incorporation of gothic elements into the building’s design and the twin Doric columns suspended on either side of the door reflect the formality of the building and the importance of the work that was intended to go on within it.
Parkhurst, more so than the other buildings of administrative row, represents a marker in the growth of Dartmouth and its evolution into more than a small regional college. Though it has long since been replaced, the old faculty meeting room in the basement of Parkhurst was designed to imitate the British House of Commons. Even decades after the American Revolution, Americans could not fully shake the influence of England from their architecture or culture: foreign influences, like Parkhurst’s pseudo-House of Commons, were nimbly adapted for the College.
Student Administrators Too
The final addition that brought the row together came from an unsolicited gift by Wallace Fullam Robinson, who wanted a building to house student offices to create, “a strong counterpoise to athleticism on one hand, and to social cliques on the other. In order to ensure the continued democracy of the College, I have stipulated that no organization shall make use of the building except those in which the qualifications for membership are proved by ability only.” Thus in 1914, Robinson Hall was constructed, following the form and style of McNutt—not College Hall—reating the first office space for students on campus. Though several interior changes have occurred, mostly as a result of the changing nature of student groups, the greatest change came with the removal of the original theater, which had for a significant time remained the only such space on campus.
Administrative row is one of the most architecturally consistent regions of the College. Rich designed each building, and taken together these buildings share many features in common, like the Classical Revival style that make them cohesive and aesthetically pleasing. The buildings are all set back from the road at the same distance, and except for Collis, they have similar flat facades all produced with similar materials. The scale of the buildings was decided very consciously, and they were designed to be similar in size, which caused even Parkhurst to be expanded significantly from its original plan; otherwise, it would not have been in keeping with the other buildings on administrative row.
The First Libraries
Upon its completion, Dartmouth Hall “housed nearly the entire College for four decades,” including the small but perennially growing library that had first begun in the homes of Eleazar Wheelock and College Librarian Belazeel Woodward. This would remain the case until the campus began to expand in the nineteenth century, during which the library moved to Reed Hall (1840), another multi-purpose building that adequately stored the entire collection with room to spare for classrooms and dormitories.
Wilson Hall, a gift from George F. Wilson of Providence, was the first purposefully built library at Dartmouth. Frederick Langzettal designed the building. Along with Bartlett Hall and the neo-Romanesque Rollins Chapel, the construction of Wilson Hall marks a period of architectural indirection at the College, where the initiative for construction came from wealthy New England donors and not from the administration. That being said, the impetus for Wilson Hall came from the fact that as the scope of studies increased at the College, so too did the volume of works it had in its library, quickly exceeding the space available at Reed Hall. Wilson would remain the College’s library until 1928, when it was renovated and turned into the college museum and home to the Anthropology department. In 1984, Wilson Hall was renovated again to accommodate the Film Studies department. In that year, the Hood Museum of Art was established, and Wilson Hall was no longer needed as the College’s museum.
1928: The Fisher Ames Baker Library
The grandest addition to the College, after Dartmouth Hall, is assuredly the Fisher Ames Baker Memorial Library, built in 1928. Larson designed a building that had to replace the aging and inadequately sized Wilson Hall and form a powerful addition to the north end of the Green. In so doing, he drew upon a popular style of the time: the Neo-Colonial emulation of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Baker fit perfectly into the College’s landscape—Gold Coast, Russell Sage, and Silsby Hall were all erected around this time—with its use of a copper roof, red brick, white molding, and three-piece design that hugs its surroundings, which was common to many buildings at Dartmouth at the time. In Baker’s case, the library stretches its arms out onto the Green. By placing Baker at the head of the Green, overlooking the rest of the campus, the College was creating a culture that placed the library at the center of everything that it did.
As Baker was going up, Sanborn House and Carpenter Hall were built alongside Baker and gave new homes to the English and Art History Departments, in addition to the much needed space for the volumes in their collections. The addition of this new library complex increased not only the space devoted to learning on campus, but also the size of the campus itself, marking the first large-scale attempt at moving north of the Green.
And Yet Another Travesty: Berry
The most recent addition to the library system at Dartmouth came in the form of the big brown box that is Berry Library. It became obvious in the eighties and nineties that Baker alone could no longer sufficiently meet the requirements of a college library either in terms of space or the new tasks—study spaces, computer labs, etc—that libraries had taken on since its construction in the twenties. Rather than constructing an entirely new building, the College expanded out from the rear of Baker and attached onto Berry.
Though no longer plagued by the constant stream of harsh criticism as during its initial planning and unveiling stage, Berry still represents an eyesore, if somewhat of a preparation for the buildings that followed it north of campus. Its greatest crime is that it breaks most of the governing rules of architecture: aside from the red brick it is built with, it retains none of the features of the Dartmouth architectural aesthetic. This shows an inability or laziness on the part of the architect to incorporate it into either the campus or the library it was intended to adjoin.
Notable Additions of the Modern Period
Some of the most architecturally significant pieces at Dartmouth came during John Sloan Dickey’s presidency and though they clashed, and still do clash, with their surroundings, they also elicit images of a constellation of buildings to which each belongs that make them desirable.
The Hopkins Center for the Arts (1962) came about from an old desire of the College’s to create a space for a theater department and the other performing arts, which simply lacked space before the construction of the Hop. Wallace K. Harrison, architect to the Rockefellers, designed the entire building before he did his similar, but far more famous, Metropolitan Opera at Lincoln Center. He would also go on to design the United Nation’s Headquarters, LaGuardia Airport, and the various buildings of Rockefeller Center in New York City.
First under President Dickey and then later under President Kemeny, architect Pier Luigi Nervi was brought in to design the Leverone Field House and the Rupert C. Thompson Arena, respectively. The concrete ice arena, though not in keeping with any preceding style at Dartmouth, sticks with the common theme of Nervi’s own work, which was far more common in Europe. His other significant works include the Olympic Stadium and Palazetto dello Sport for the 1960 Olympic games in Rome. The reinforced concrete work he used in Thompson Arena, in addition to being a defining characteristic of his work, was also an engineering marvel for its time.
The building of an arts center and athletic centers shows the shifting emphasis the College was placing on the experience of being a Dartmouth student. In the 1960s, being a student meant more than mere academics—the Dartmouth student was also an athlete and a performer, well rounded and well adjusted.
Final Words
Some of the most recent additions to the College, like some of their predecessors, are buildings not in keeping with the Dartmouth aesthetic. In addition, a quick look at the most recent additions to the College will give us insight into what values and ideals the College is promoting today. For instance, Kemeny Hall (2006) houses the research-oriented Mathematics department, and includes ample lab space. The Haldeman Center (2006) is also research focused, and is the home of the Dickey Center for International Understanding, the Ethics Institute and the Leslie Center for the Humanities.
New dorm clusters have also been erected to meet the growing needs to students: the Fahey-McLane and the McLaughlin dorms (2006). These dorms lack the character of their older counterparts along the Gold Coast or Massachusets row: rather, much like the East Wheelock cluster, they feel sterile and more reminiscent of a hotel than college dorm. The new dorms, however, do have many lounges and social spaces to develop community intimacy.
Thomas Jefferson, the first American to emphasize the importance of architecture to a country, knew that the architecture of a nation is a reflection of that nation’s character. Similarly, the architecture of a college campus reflects the ideas and ideals that the college most cherishes, and as students at this college, we can see the history of Dartmouth stretched out before us in its buildings. As those buildings have changed, we can put the pieces of the puzzles together and determine what ideas and cultural movements inspired such changes.