Book Review: Complexity and Contradiction in Hanover

As the ongoing controversy over plans for the $52 million Visual Arts Center attests, complaining about the architecture of Dartmouth College is a thriving pastime in the Upper Valley. Those who take this hobby seriously will want the recently published Dartmouth College: An Architectural Tour, the latest in the Campus Guide series from the Princeton Architectural Press.

What the guide demonstrates is that all the kvetching is really a tribute to the stunning diversity of architectural choices the college has made since founder Eleazar Wheelock started it all with a log cabin in 1770. There is something here for everyone to abhor. If neoclassicism strikes you as bombastic, sidle up to the Corinthian columns of Webster Hall. Cross College Street and check out Rollins Chapel if the muscular Richardsonian Romanesque style seems too testosteronian to you. Across the Green is the Hopkins Center, an International Style tour de force that never fails to bug strident historicists.

How all of the forces of the universe conspired to bring this rich collection into being is the narrative that underlies the guide. Unfortunately, some of the story is transparently fictional.

If you travel Wheelock Street, you have probably noticed that New Hampshire Hall is currently undergoing renovation. And yet, oddly, page 70 of the guide features a photograph of a lounge from the rehabbed dorm, complete with a hokey assortment of students (one strumming a guitar, two chatting amiably, two reading and one tapping at his laptop) improbably using the place all at once.

That kind of Photoshop realism might be okay in an admissions office brochure, but it is not worthy of a serious architectural guide documenting one Ivy League School and referencing a second in the name of its publisher. Other, similar efforts to avoid guidebook obsolescence by anticipating Dartmouth's emerging buildings are only somewhat less egregious.

The author of the guide is Charlottesville, Virginia attorney and Dartmouth alumnus Scott Meacham -- an interesting choice for several reasons. Meacham has long maintained a lively web site about Dartmouth's buildings, http://www.dartmo.com/, proving that lawyers are well-suited to architectural criticism. But rumors persist that Dartmouth nixed an earlier version of the guide, by a different author.

Meacham has a masters in architectural history from his hometown University of Virginia, which is the anti-Dartmouth, both historically and architecturally. The famous 1819 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Dartmouth College v. Woodward thwarted efforts by the then-dominant Anti-Federalists to turn the school into a public institution in the manner of the university founded by party standard-bearer Thomas Jefferson.

As designed by the architectural autodidact Jefferson, the fabled original campus of the University of Virginia is a festival of formalism with its arcade-linked pavilions spreading outward from the iconic Rotunda building. In contrast, Dartmouth's campus is suffused with what Meacham aptly describes as "crispness and austerity."

What leads Meacham somewhat astray in this regard is pride in his alma mater, which he implies is uniquely crisp and austere because it avoids the "popular tropes of campus architecture" like "Gothic spires, enclosed quadrangles, domed buildings, or extensive colonnades." In fact, rural New England is awash in trope-free historic campuses. For example, the iconic trio of Dartmouth, Wentworth and Thornton halls has a roughly contemporaneous analog in Old Stone Row at Middlebury College, an arguably more distinctive and austere assemblage of granite and Greek revivalism. And so on, from Bowdoin in Maine to Williams in Massachusetts.

Besides, Dartmouth actually succumbs to a few tropes of its own, like the arcade that connects Baker Library to Silsby Hall, the colonnade in front of Berry Library, the mannerist do-dads that decorate Wilder Hall (helpfully identified by Meacham as "exaggerated granite voussoirs" and "emphatic quoining") and gazillions of vestigial window shutters.

Still, this guide provides priceless context for the buildings we love to hate. Those who gripe that Dartmouth dominates Hanover will be reminded that Dartmouth actually created the town, a circumstance unique in New England. Afficionadoes who discern banality in the parade of early 20th Century pseudo-colonial dorms may enjoy the revelation that they date from a kinder and gentler era, in which the College simply built to meet demand rather than resort to selective admissions.

Seekers of such enlightenment should definitely grab the first edition since subsequent ones will probably correct the numerous and amusing editing errors. The best is probably the reference to a 1965 renovation that gave Rollins Chapel a "robbing room." As Meacham notes, Dartmouth has come a long way since the end of mandatory morning chapel nearly a century ago.

[Recognize the bit of Dartmouth architecture pictured above? Hint: It's not pictured in the Guide.]