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July 22, 2008, 11:33 AM ET
Dartmouth Plans a Visual-Arts Center as a New Campus Gateway
Dartmouth College plans to build a new visual-arts center that will face downtown Hanover, N.H. (Dartmouth College image)
Dartmouth College is planning to tidy up a messy corner of its campus by demolishing two buildings behind a heating plant and replacing them with a $52-million visual-arts center by the high-profile Boston architecture firm Machado and Silvetti Associates, The Dartmouth reports.
The project would create a striking new gateway onto the campus from Lebanon Street, a busy thoroughfare. The site is at back of the Hood Museum of Art, Charles Moore’s 1985 postmodern masterpiece, and beside the far reaches of the Hopkins Center, the college’s rambling performing-arts complex. That edge of the campus is currently marked by a jigsaw puzzle’s worth of parking lots and walkways. A blogger who writes about Dartmouth buildings identifies one of the structures being demolished as a former auto dealership whose main block dates to 1914.
Machado and Silvetti’s other campus building’s include Willard J. Walker Hall at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville and a new entrance pavilion for Bowdoin College’s Museum of Art. For Dartmouth, the firm has designed a three-story building with a sleek facade of slate, stone, and glass.
Renderings of the design were released last week and quickly produced a minor tempest. A member of a town-college liaison committee, Marilyn Black, criticized the facade as “hideous” in an article in the Valley News that was picked up by several other newspapers. College officials responded that the building’s urban aesthetic is appropriate for the downtown location, and added that they were “not taking away some charming corner of Hanover.”
Construction is set to begin in September 2009 and to be completed two years later.
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