Chan's Conservative Master Plan

by Scott Meacham

I would like the place to stay exactly the way it was when I was there, but even that was just a moment in time--a few years before I got there in 1991, there were single-sex dorms that had been that way since they were first co-educated, and the Thayer School had no good modern facilities or Great Hall, and the dorms didn't have good social rooms or even rudimentary kitchens. And in the early 1920s, during the heyday of tradition when everyone knew all the songs and graduated with a cane, Baker Library didn't exist and upperclassmen ate in private eating clubs.

As long as the school keeps its campus physically integrated and its borders as close as possible, a rise in enrollment is more worrisome than the construction of new buildings. And the administration is at least saying that there is no enrollment growth in the works, that the new buildings are to keep facilities up to date and take care of past growth.

Looking at the new Lo-Yi Chan master plan that the College released last fall, we have to keep in mind how master plans work. Plans like this do not claim that "the school intends to build all of these buildings," rather that "the next time the school needs to build a building, these are the best places." The architect or planner does not necessarily think all the buildings are needed, but he has been hired to find sites for a certain amount of square footage.

A master plan represents, I suppose, inherently a change in the status quo--but without earlier master plans we would not have the campus that everyone cherishes. And construction almost never follows a master plan exactly, with Dartmouth as a prime example.

Chan's 2000 plan is the most conservative in the hundred years or so that the school has been making master plans as we think of them. Urban design is in a period of traditionalist ascendancy, visible in anti-sprawl movements, the "New Urbanism" (see the Congress for the New Urbanism), "Smart Growth" initiatives in Maryland, and so on--even the popular use of the term "sprawl" in a pejorative sense.

One reason the plan is conservative is its scale: Imagine being an alumnus at the turn of the century and seeing a building go up almost every year for twenty years. This was at a school that had had only seven buildings in 1881, and ten in 1891. John Russell Pope's plan of the early 1920s, from which the school took some guiding ideas but almost no specific building sites, was also quite expansive. Jens Larson built a lot of buildings in the mid-1920s, but they were nothing compared to what his plans showed. Tuck Mall as it stands was laid out on lawns and trees in one stroke, and every building on it outside of Hitchcock and Blunt dates from the twenties and up. And the mall is not even full yet.

Truly horrid plans from the 1950s show Choate-pods and alien hexagons plopped all over, marching up Occom Ridge, but few of them got built. Dartmouth's historic master plans have been many times larger than what Chan proposes, all at a school with a smaller population and a smaller campus than today.

Chan's plan strikes an incremental attitude toward growth. The plan does not expand the borders of the campus. It proposes mostly additions, with relatively little new construction. The plan is sensitive, improving each site over what exists today--many of its building sites are merely parking lots. The plan attempts to respect existing urban patterns and aims to enclose public spaces rather than build isolated buildings. Imagine the new, welcoming Thayer School quad and compare it to the formless and socially-isolating Modernist spaces left around the River Cluster or the Blunt addition.

Rather than striving for some bold stroke or new armature, the plan picks up elements of earlier designs put out by VSBA, Centerbrook, and others. There is only one place a studio art building can go on Lebanon Street, and we should be worried if Chan had tried something radical or unnatural there. Many of his building sites are inevitable, places almost any other designer would also pick. For an architect, inevitability is usually a compliment.

Even where the plan proposes new buildings north of Maynard Street, it chooses to reoccupy vacant building sites or parking lots rather than colonize virgin land. Is that place better or worse after you put a building down? The forgotten, paved-over ravine north of Baker will be a much better space under current plans. Chan's plan does not even show much acquisition of private land--note the prim avoidance of Psi Upsilon. The plan also recommends little demolition, perhaps only Brewster and a Tuck Drive entrance (along with Kiewit and Bradley-Gerry in progress).

Another sign of the plan's conservatism is its rejection of the VSBA quad proposal. I don't know how long the school operated under the idea that it would carry out that plan,

but at some point Dartmouth's architects pulled back and decided to build just a single row instead of the crowded quadrangle. This was always an option under the quad idea, but one that probably made the locals seem to lack gumption in the eyes of Venturi and Scott Brown. So Kemeny Hall moves from the Raven site to North Main and leaves room for another building below Moore.

I hope Moore does not seem too out of place; while I liked the idea of an enclosed quad or mall, I agree that a whole quad full of buildings of the scale the school believes it needs would be overwhelming.

The most radical change as I see it is the growth north of Maynard. But students have been walking to Dick's House and taking classes in the Medical School for years--we have to ask if it is better to leave those buildings isolated and perceptually distant, or to integrate them into the campus. I imagine the mindset of thirty years ago thinking that, even if we leave up an ugly building for economic reasons, we still plan to tear it down. A better approach might be to realize that a building is a huge investment of resources too valuable to get rid of, and to strive to improve it to meet our standards. I wish the Medical School had not been built, but what Dartmouth needs to do now is build an excellent building in front of it. That parking lot north of Maynard will unquestionably be improved as well--keep in mind it was a big 1950s hospital a few years ago.

All of this is possible because the Hospital thought it had too little room to grow and left town, opening up the space for the college. Hanover lost an old institution and the Medical School moved to an isolated suburban site, but in many ways the hospital leaving has made the campus more pleasant. Almost every time someone drove to the hospital or rode in an ambulance, he came through town.

Looking at a map in a few years, it will be the River Cluster that we recognize as an obvious departure from traditional methods of expansion, while the current construction will not be so easy to spot. It is almost as if the school had been artificially blocked at Baker for so long and had expanded to the sides instead--the idea being that Baker is the center of the campus with other things only now able to fill in around it where they belong.

The new dorms on Maynard will be no farther from the Green than the Thayer School or KDE, maybe a bit beyond the distance to McCulloch; they will put the River Cluster to shame, and perhaps even let students move out of there for someplace more appropriate.