|
Valley
News, October 11, 2005
Donald Maurice Kreis
Vox
clamatis in deserto –
the motto through which Dartmouth College posits itself as a voice
clamoring in the wilderness – is no mere abstraction to James Larimore.
As
dean of the college, Larimore is well-acquainted with campus clamor.
But it was the wilderness that really struck him when he returned
to Dartmouth in 1999 from Stanford. Although the campus is organized
around a town green, Larimore noticed that in contrast to other
schools, at Dartmouth “the buildings are located far enough apart
that you’re able to see through the spaces between them to a more
rough and tumble New England landscape.”
Since
Dartmouth’s residence halls are part of Larimore’s official portfolio,
preserving this unique scale and feel is something he has sought
to accomplish as the college has sought to expand and renovate its
network of dormitories during his tenure. It has not always been
easy.
A
case in point is the new “McLaughlin Cluster” residence complex
now taking shape at the corner of College and Maynard streets.
Although the site was once occupied by Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical
Center, neighbors from nearby Rope Ferry Road complained vigorously
about the prospect of 342 students living in their midst. And
the complex’s putative occupants, paying more than $40,000 a year
for the privilege of living and learning at Dartmouth, don’t necessarily
think “rough and tumble” when imagining dormitory life.
Ultimately,
and quite ironically, if the project is successful in perpetuating
the notion of Dartmouth as a campus in the woods, it will be because
lead architect Buzz Yudell and his colleagues at Moore Ruble Yudell
in Santa Monica, California (in association with Bruner/Cott of
Cambridge) applied principles of urbanism to the task.
“We
want to be good neighbors by defining the street, and by providing
multiple entries, porches and implied porches, like any building
in a village or town” said Yudell, in an interview from his office.
It’s a description that owes much to The Death and Life of
Great American Cities , Jane Jacobs’ 1961 classic about the
value of vibrant street life and lively neighborhoods.
Jargon
aside – streets don’t have definitions, porches cannot truly be
implied – what Yudell and his team has wrought is a set of buildings
that generally fill the outer perimeter of their site, framing a
courtyard within. There are indeed porches and things that look
like porches, to give the street façade some variety. The project
was scaled back from four to three stories to address nearby residents’
concerns about maintaining a sense of neighborhood.
The
style is mostly the familiar, red brick Dartmouth neo-classicism,
but with contemporary flourishes like with square parapets. These
gable-ends owe more to Piet Mondrian (the early 20 th Century Dutch
artist who helped invent abstract painting) or Gerit Reitveld (the
early 20 th Century architect who was inspired by Mondrian) than
to Robert Stern (the contemporary neo-traditionalist who designed
the psychology building across Maynard Street). It is designed
to resonate with the same architects’ Kemeny Hall, the new mathematics
building now rising at a nearby site adjacent to Berry Library.
Scale
is a crucial element in the dorm design. Essentially this project
is two sets of three buildings, each of a size commensurate with
those of the older campus buildings that create the wilderness effect
so pleasing to Larimore. Each trio is connected via two recessed
pavilions of white clapboard in what would have been, in an era
when students apparently did not mind so much exposure to the elements,
the open spaces between the buildings.
The
current era of college students is one in which administrators and
architects are tempted to engage in heavy-handed social engineering
in the creation of new student housing. For example, here is what
architect Steven Holl has said about award-winning Simmons Hall,
the new dorm at MIT he designed, which resembles a giant kitchen
sponge placed on end: “We strove to make spaces that would inspire
the students who lived there, to compel them to revel in the unexpected,
to see the world with fresh eyes.”
Yudell
and his client in Hanover are not trying to compel anyone to do
anything. “Support, or nurture, would be closer to our hope for
what student housing can do,” Yudell explains.
“We
want students to think of the residence halls as their homes,” agrees
Martin Redman, Dartmouth’s dean of residential life. This means
moving away from the dreary, motel-like dorms that every school
seemed to build in the 1950s and 60s, organized around long, dark
cinderblock corridors with rooms on each side and communal bathrooms.
Instead,
Yudell made sure the corridors of the McLaughlin Cluster would have
natural light and widen at key points so as to allow the kind of
hallway hanging out that can make dorm life so convivial. There
is a small bathroom outside each pair of rooms, many of which are
singles. Windows are deliberately oversized – “people are phototropic,”
in Yudell’s phrase – but triple-glazed in concession to winter.
Redman
and others who oversee student housing are well aware that more
and more students grow up without sharing a bedroom. They know
that many spend semesters in Europe where students cultivate worldly
expectations of living accommodations. They realize that the digital
age can make campus life both more communal (since laptops are so
portable) and more hermetic (because those so inclined can pass
their time as room-bound web surfers).
Thus,
Yudell seeks what he calls the “sweet spot between privacy and not
encouraging isolation” when he designs student housing. He is
likely to achieve it, in the opinion of Marlene Heck, a senior lecturer
who teaches architectural history at Dartmouth.
“Simmons
is going to be one hulking eyesore long before [a preschooler of
today] is scouting out colleges,” Heck maintains, referring to Holl’s
MIT project. “Moore Ruble Yudell, on the other hand, still cares,
still thinks about the 18, 19 and 20-year olds that will hang in
the halls, fall into their beds at the end of long days and learn
to live with someone they never would have chosen for a roommate.”
As
a result, and whatever judgment history ultimately imposes, MIT
has another icon on its campus – one that proves its architect’s
amusing hypothesis that you can now use anything, even a sponge,
as the starting-point for creating a building. Yudell, on the
other hand, is unlikely to see the McLaughlin Cluster on the cover
of any architecture magazines.
This
is exactly what the client wants. “We tend to think of our residence
halls as important and buildings we want to fit in with our campus,
rather than being iconic buildings,” says Larimore.
There
is, nevertheless, some impression among ex-college students of a
certain age that, in comparison to a generation ago, the campuses
of the elite New England schools have steadily grown more resort-like
as tuition has soared. Everyone involved with the McLaughlin project
emphatically denies that Dartmouth has succumbed to this temptation.
Yudell
points to the building’s environmental attributes – its tight envelope
and efficient heating system is designed to make the complex a candidate
for LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification
from the U.S. Green Building Council – in maintaining that the buildings
will, over time, actually pay for themselves. Redman maintains
that certain state schools in other regions have created a “luxury
market” in student housing, and Dartmouth isn’t playing.
“As
a paying parent, it’s what I’d expect,” Redman says. “If my daughter
wants a Jacuzzi she can get a job and join a fitness club.”
Most
convincingly, Larimore cites an obligation to donors and parents
to spend money wisely and maintains that two factors – the need
to attract and keep excellent faculty, and Dartmouth’s commitment
to need-blind admissions – are what drives tuition skyward. “We’ve
resisted the temptation to build resort-class facilities,” says
the dean of the college.
Only
one disquieting thing remains. Who really wants to live in something
called a ‘cluster’? The word evokes swarming insects or even terminal
illness (since the phrase “cancer cluster” is one used by epidemiologists).
Maybe this is what made the folks on Rope Ferry Road, who used
to have a hospital and all its attendant commotion in their neighborhood,
nervous about 342 swarming undergraduates.
The
$33 million project is scheduled to open in the fall of 2006. It
will function like a pair of cupped hands, holding within it a
great deal of collegiate hijinks, ingenuous scholarship and post-adolescent
omphaloskepsis. That will leave the rest of the rough and tumble
New England landscape, and the quiet homes along Rope Ferry Road,
quite unmolested.
back to top
|
