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Donald Maurice Kreis
Leno Filippi would be delighted if you never
noticed his latest creation, even though it's the biggest and maybe
even the most important building to be constructed in downtown Hanover
since the invention of the automobile.
Filippi, an architect with the Boston firm of
Childs Bertman Tseckares, Inc., is the guy whose judgment and even
sanity you were questioning all those months while his design for
Seven Lebanon Street was rising behind giant scaffolding, covered
in plastic sheeting, that made the structure look as if it would
overwhelm its neighbors and blow away any semblance of dignified
street line along this important pedestrian and vehicular byway.
But, now that the scaffolding is gone and the building and its accompanying
public parking facility are open for business, those who work or
shop or play in Hanover can see Filippi's design for what it truly
is: a dignified addition to the townscape, whose genius lies in
the unobtrusive way it seeks to solve certain nagging downtown problems
on behalf of its client, Dartmouth College's Real Estate Office.
To grasp how significant an achievement architectural
invisibility can become, consider how huge Seven Lebanon Street
truly is. The building weighs in at 45,000 square feet, or nearly
ten percent of the total commercial space available in downtown
Hanover, without even counting the 289-space parking garage that,
since its opening, leaves weekday visitors wondering whether some
new holiday has been declared, so much relief does this facility
provide to the endemic downtown parking crunch.
"The building was conceived as a background
building," acknowledges Filippi, seemingly happy to leave the
awards and the attention to the brand-name architects who typically
design the buildings on the Dartmouth campus itself. His effort
on behalf of the College's more prosaic commercial real estate subsidiary
is really about, in his words, "filling a tooth that was missing."
The gap to which Filippi metaphorically refers,
of course, is the street line that progresses along the south side
of Lebanon Street from the post office to Hanover Park to the buildings
that house Subway, Ben & Jerry's and the New Hampshire League
of Craftsmen, and finally to the restored Grange Hall now inhabited
by Rosey Jeke's. The comparison was apt; the hole created by what
was previously an empty lot deprived Lebanon Street of what might
be characterized as a kind of critical mass - as if it were not
quite part of downtown in the same sense that Main Street's solid
rows of commercial buildings are.
Filling the gap was more challenging than it
appears. The giant parking garage is blessedly invisible as a structure,
since all but the topmost of its four levels are below grade from
the Lebanon Street side. Stylistically, the building speaks the
language of the early 19th Century commercial block, a classic set
of design parameters that universally evokes the image of thriving,
pre-automobile downtowns. Later variations on this theme became
caught up in Victorian decorative complications - fancy ironwork,
elaborate cornices, turrets, towers and other frippery - but, fortunately,
the more austere antecedents on which Filippi called resonate with
modern architecture's thirst for simplicity.
"One of the driving issues of the building
was to make it sympathetic to the vocabulary of Hanover, but to
do it in a modern way," Filippi explains. So this contemporary
adaptation of the traditional 19th Century commercial block folds
back upon itself twice, to form a c-shaped structure around a courtyard
opening onto the garage, with an arcade crowned by a decidedly un-19th
Century metal arch and leading through the building to the courtyard,
artfully framing a pagoda-like structure that turns out to be the
stairway leading to the below-ground parking levels. The arcade
and pagoda are oriented diagonally toward main street, a gesture
that effectively creates a visual and actual pathway linking the
new building and garage to the action on Main Street.
To the immediate right of Seven Lebanon Street
is striking evidence of how similar architectural aspirations can
go horribly awry. Hanover Park, home to the Panda House restaurant,
the Pompanoosuc Mills furniture store and other retail businesses,
is also an attempt to place a modern gloss on design gestures that
recall historic New England towns. The result: foolishly fussy details,
juxtaposed with giant windows that lack all of the proportion and
scale that 19th Century designers instinctively understood, and
a building devoid of grace. Moreover, Hanover Park drops all pretense
of being attractive; surfaces that are not plainly on view to the
Street lack any decorative finish. At Seven Lebanon Street, the
decorative brickwork and fenestration are everywhere and, indeed,
one of the building's most attractive brick faces shows itself to
the back entrance to the parking facility and nearby alley.
Yes, there are quibbles to be quibbled here.
One could well argue that a 'background building' is an actually
opportunity to take more architectural chances than one would in
the foreground. For example, the Harvard counterpart to Dartmouth's
Real Estate Office has hired Viennese architect Hans Hollein, a
winner of architecture's coveted Pritzker Prize, to design a building
similar in purpose to Filippi's Hanover project. Hollein's commission
at 95 Mount Auburn Street in Cambridge won't remind anyone of the
19th Century; its planned facade consists of a "tilted undulating
metal screen," to quote Boston Globe architecture critic Robert
Campbell. But, as Campbell pointed out, Cambridge has long derived
its architectural energy from bold juxtapositions of styles and
visions. For better or worse, Hanover's destiny is as a certifiably
quaint New England college town, and seeing to that is presumably
one big reason Dartmouth has a real estate office to dabble in off-campus
projects in the first place.
That Dartmouth has the motivation and the muscle
to maintain a certain image in Hanover, and thus perpetuate the
desired backdrop for the life of an Ivy League School, is both a
blessing and a bane for the Upper Valley. Dartmouth developed the
Centerra Marketplace and Resource Park in Lebanon as a means of
moving real-life, sprawl-inducing enterprises out of Hanover. The
results are as sensible and pleasant an accommodation to automobile-dependent
economic activity as anyone could ever realistically hope for while
caught in traffic along the ugly commercial strips on Route 120
in West Lebanon. Seven Lebanon Street has similar virtues.
"New buildings are all veneer," observes
Filippi, by way of expressing pride in certain of his design's details.
He likes the stone sills beneath the windows, and the lintels of
precast concrete above them - substantial elements that arose out
of a time when a building's outside walls also did the job of supporting
the building as a whole. Now a steel skeleton holds up a big commercial
building like Seven Lebanon Street, which typically allows for steel
sills and lintels and, generally, outside surfaces that lack the
texture and depth, and thus the sensual pleasures, of load-bearing
stone and brick. But, in Filippi's design, those pleasures come
at the expense of fidelity to "form follows function,"
an enduring aphorism of Louis Sullivan, the famous Chicago architect
who helped invent the skyscraper a century ago. Sullivan would discern
a kind of unwelcome falsehood in an outside wall that, in the form
it assumes, is pretending not to be liberated of its load-bearing
function. On a macro scale, that falsehood is the bane of Dartmouth's
almost feudal dominance of Hanover, a town whose organic development
as a real place is forever thwarted so that it may recall an idyllic
village life that perhaps never really was.
Form also flaunts function along South Street
and Currier Place, where the parking facility emerges from below
grade to present this project's least successful facades. Like so
many garage structures that strive to avoid ugliness, this one does
so with brick and metal detailing that is supposed to make the facility
resemble a regular building that is inhabited by people rather than
cars. The effect is unconvincing.
But give Dartmouth and its architect extra credit
for supplying a staircase and pedestrian entrance at the South and
Currier corner diagonally across from the Howe Library. Whether
by coincidence or design, the result is a pedestrian-only Knowledge
Trail, linking the cheerily proletarian public library to the south
with New Hampshire's most important academic library at Dartmouth's
emerging North Campus. The trail runs through the Seven Lebanon
Street arcade, across the street and through the Hopkins Center,
traversing Dartmouth Green, through the elegant portal of Baker
Library and down the indoor pedestrian "main street" that
Philadelphia architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown view
as the decisive achievement of their design for the new Berry Library.
Some of whether Seven Lebanon Street is truly
successful remains to be determined. Yes, it provides an unobtrusive
home for certain of the College's back-office functions, like payroll
and personnel that would otherwise clutter the campus or overwhelm
the downtown, while easing the parking crisis and decisively pointing
the neighborhood in the direction of retaining its historic character.
But, on the first floor, where Talbot's is open and Advest is moving
in, several hundred square feet of prime retail space remains unclaimed.
Property Manager Robert Christensen of Dartmouth Real Estate hopes
for a tenant that will operate a restaurant with live music, perhaps
spreading itself onto the courtyard in summertime. Food seems to
be a key element of the Knowledge trail, in the Hopkins Center and
even at Berry, where a lobby snack bar must have the stern librarians
of yesteryear rolling in their graves. But for the critical location
at Seven Lebanon Street, something grander is in order, to add real
life to this background building.
"You wouldn't put a McDonald's next to
Talbots," Christensen assures. Not if Dartmouth College has
anything to say about the matter - and, in Hanover, it most certainly
does.
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