HOPKINS CENTER

Final Plans for Auditorium Building Are Based On Broad Concept of Daily Social and Cultural Use by Undergraduates, Faculty and Alumni

WHEN THE CORNERSTONE of the Hopkins Center is laid, which the Board of Trustees has voted will be "as soon as building conditions permit," the structure will approach perfection in concept and detail if long study and thorough planning are the ingredients of success. The Trustees were satisfied at their October meeting in Hanover that President Dickey's requirement of provision in the new auditorium building for "increased daily use by students, faculty, and alumni generally" had been met. A report from its plant committee, which followed meetings of this alumni group and months of intensive study by an advisory committee in Hanover, was unanimously approved by the Board. Thus the structure originally designed to replace Webster Hall, and now broadened to meet other prime needs of the College, moves to the final stage of de tailed architect's plans and specifications. Its new form is recognizable to old friends who have labored on earlier committees or have watched progress of the plans, but its exterior front is changed, its uses have been multiplied, and its strategic areas redesigned to meet varied basic needs in student, alumni, and faculty life.

The building will stand on the strategic cross-roads location of Bissell Hall at the south end of the campus adjoining the Inn. All of the rooms facing the campus will be devoted to social and recreational headquarters for alumni, undergraduates, and faculty. This gives an idea of how far the plans have developed from the earlier conception of erecting only an auditorium and theater, surrounded by allied activities. The need for an auditorium large enough to replace Webster, which seats only about 1300 of the normal student body of 3400, has mounted through the years. This need will be met in the Hopkins Center. But additional facilities in the way of a student union, alumni headquarters, faculty social center, enlarged space for the Hanover Inn, and much-needed quarters for the Department of Music offer impressive evidence that the building will be alive both day and night.

In many ways the newest plans for the building resemble recommendations made nearly two decades ago by the group headed by the late Dean Strong for creating a "Dartmouth House" development at the south end of the campus. This first committee to tackle the necessity of improving facilities for social life agreed on an auditorium as a central feature of the plan and this has persisted as a Number One plant requirement for twenty years. Dartmouth House also would have vided the faculty with clubrooms and eating facilities, and it would have filled the void in undergraduate life caused by the lack of student union facilities for the whole College whether fraternity members, non-members, or freshmen. These two features of the early plan have recurred and are definitely scheduled to be translated into brick and mortar.

With the growth oF the alumni body, now numbering about 24,000, and the increasing visits of Dartmouth people to Hanover, there is no room for doubt about the great importance of adequate campus headquarters for alumni and their families. The Hanover Inn struggles valiantly to accommodate the throng but its facilities need to be expanded both in number of rooms and in lounge and dining areas for use on crowded and popular weekends. The Hopkins Center will provide an alumni lounge, an alumni promenade, revamped and enlarged dining rooms for the Inn, a cocktail lounge, faculty social rooms where visiting alumni will be welcomed, and other appurtenances to help solve the increasing need for a home and headquarters in Hanover for alumni visitors and their guests.

These are some of the old and some of the new needs that the building will meet in its areas facing the campus. The structure will balance Baker Library at the opposite end of the campus, in architectural harmony with the dominant Colonial exterior of the Dartmouth plant. But liberal use of glass will achieve a concept, which originated with President Dickey, for expanding the opportunity to view the passing scene of life on the campus, the tower of Baker Library, the white stretch of Dartmouth Row. The alumni promenade, connecting the Inn with the new building, will be constructed as a long glass-faced lounge on the campus side of the entire Inn wing. This is only one of numerous vantage points from which to view the College in fact every room facing the campus will be opened up through generous window treatment. The objective is to enable all who use the building to look out from the areas extending across the south side of the campus.

Cultural and educational features of the Hopkins Center will be sufficiently varied to appeal to a great many different men. Musical interests, with the increasing number of students and a larger teaching staff, are going to have for the first time topnotch facilities for instruction and extracurricular development. Special recordplaying rooms will be available. The Players and their large and enthusiastic audiences will at long last enjoy excellent theater facilities. The present necessity of turning down hundreds of ticket applications for the Webster Hall concert series will be eliminated by the new auditorium which will provide 2750 seats for these big musical events in Hanover. Radio is now established as a growing student activity, with the Dartmouth Broadcasting System channeled for reception around the campus. DBS and its student listeners will benefit from vastly improved studio arrangements in the Center.

Mention of the big auditorium will recall to alumni the inadequate, uncomfortable, and unventilated Webster Hall. Dartmouth needs a place big enough to bring its student body, faculty, and friends together for the great occasions that mark the passage of years in its long life. The new auditorium will be adequate in respect to size, comfort, ventilation, sight lines, adaptability to large or smaller audiences, stage facilities, movies, grand opera, symphony concerts, student variety shows, lectures by the President of the United States or others, a Christmas party and carol service for the whole student body, national radio shows emanating from Hanover, Dartmouth band and glee club concerts, Carnival shows by The Players, and other events serious or entertaining that will frequently bring the youngest members of the Dartmouth family together. It seemed to observers that there were just about as many people who were unable to get into Webster to hear President Dickey at the opening of College this fall as were jammed inside, filling the stairs, aisles, lobby, and window sills. The limits of space at Commencement, in case of rain and shift of the exercises indoors have caused bitter disappointment to about half the guests of seniors.

Important as all of these interests are, the average student will find more than one feature of the building a part of his daily life. He will use the game rooms, or drop in at the tavern in the basement; read, write, play cards, or listen to records in the undergraduate lounge; find refreshment at the big soda bar, entertain his date in the rooms supervised by the College Hostess, and perhaps find a place for her to stay in the girls' dormitory on the top floor of the addition to the Inn. He will attend some of the large College events in the auditorium and will participate in class smokers, tea dances, or other social activities in the lounge areas available for such events. Centralized information and tickets for all events will be available in the alumni lounge.

Without going into detail the major plans of the Hopkins Center can be briefly summarized:

On the basement level nearest the campus a large undergraduate game room for billiards, pool, and ping pong can be converted to a coatroom for occasions when the auditorium is in use. A large student tavern will fill the basement area between the new building and the Inn. The rear, or south, end of the building will include music practice rooms on the basement level and provides entrance to the theater.

Approaching from the campus, entrance on the ground floor leads immediately into the alumni lounge a spacious area to be used daily as a great living room of the College and on special occasions for large alumni gatherings, dances, and other social events. This will also serve the audi protorium as a lobby of adequate area and height when there is a large crowd attending an event in the building. The dual use of the alumni lounge avoiding treatment of it as a theater lobby and emphasizing its daily use for social purposes is an example of the double use of many areas in the Center. The main floor of the auditorium is also on this ground level, as are its stage facilities and the main floor of the theater which adjoins the music classrooms at the south end of the building, with access from College Street. There is a fortunate slope in the ground level toward the south which will eliminate necessity of extensive excavation for the theater and music sections.

The undergraduate lounge with adjoining roomy areas overlooking the lobby is the feature of the second floor level. Here the soda bar and quarters for Dartmouth House, in charge of the College Hostess, will be located. Experience with the Hostess House (later renamed "Dartmouth House") during the war has indicated the need for such facilities in the future. At the present time a social headquarters for students and their dates is temporarily provided in College Hall where Mrs. Margaret Broderick is the College Hostess. The rooms are receiving heavy use. A crowd jammed Dartmouth House at dances after the Columbia game October 26, and the throng in College Hall was so large (including numbers of visiting alumni) on the Harvard weekend, November 9, that Mrs. Broderick opened up Commons, the freshman dining hall, and even then dance space was over-taxed. The need for this type of "all-College" social headquarters has been proven and these facilities will be a popular and highly useful feature of the Center.

The portion of the second floor facing the campus has sufficient depth to offer a large lounge with a broad view of the campus. Furnished with such things as newspapers and magazines, chess, checkers and card tables, it provides opportunity for quiet relaxation. It offers needed facilities for informal social occasions of undergraduate organizations. The second floor level in other parts of the building is given over to the auditorium and theater balconies, a library for the music and drama departments, music faculty studio offices, record listening booths, and stage areas.

Additional bedrooms for the Hanover Inn are provided in the connecting building on the second, third, and fourth floor levels.

Above the main entrance to the Center, on the fourth floor, are clubrooms for use of faculty and alumni. Faculty members need more attractive social facilities for their own recreation and for the educational good which can result through testing views in friendly argument and discussion. The Hopkins Center provides faculty clubrooms where visiting alumni will be welcomed. Near the end of the lounge extending along the Inn wing will be a selfoperated elevator to the fourth floor area over the auditorium lobby. The club lounge has a commanding view of the campus. There will also be a small ladies' lounge, a billiard room and a card room, two conference rooms, a pantry and locker room. A dining room for the faculty and their alumni guests is provided near the elevator in the extended Inn wing.

Music, radio, and dramatic facilities occupy the third and fourth, floors at the south end of the building.

The plan will provide about thirty more bedrooms for the Hanover Inn and will relieve the Inn's limited lounge areas on crowded weekends through availability of the alumni lounge and alumni promenade. A cocktail lounge and a dining room to be operated in conjunction with the faculty clubrooms will be added to the Inn's present facilities. It is also planned to open the Inn dining room at its north side to the alumni promenade. The plan contemplates moving the street between the Inn and the campus, using the present north lane as the south portion, with a new lane to be created just north of the present line of trees which would be preserved. This change in the street is regarded as very important by all of the groups engaged in developing the south end of the campus. One result will be an increase in the lawn area in front of the Hanover Inn. A garden court to the south of the Inn, and further expansion of the hotel in that direction, are also contemplated and are now under study.

During recent months, preliminary steps have been taken to establish the required senior-year course in "Great Issues." Course meetings of the entire senior class may be held in the theater, with its excellent arrangements. Educational movies may also be shown here to large groupsthe field of audio-visual education is constantly broadening and these instructional aids are increasingly important at Dartmouth. These uses of the theater will be supplementary to the great promise it gives of meeting the need for adequate stage facilities for dramatics, and for the accommodation of Players' audiences.

The department of art and other groups in Hanover have indicated their keen interest in the use of lounge and promenade areas in the Center for exhibit purposes. Works of art and a variety of other types of exhibits can be shown there to great advantage. Display cases, recessed in the walls, will provide excellent facilities for meeting this need of the College.

Not often does a college have an opportunity to create appropriate memorials such as is offered to classes or individuals the many features of the Center. A lounge or a music room, or any one of many other distinctive parts of the building, will be available for this purpose.

THE HOPKINS WAR MEMORIAL PROGRAM was formulated last January by the Alumni Council whose recommendations were approved by the Board of Trustees. The Council, with subsequent endorsement of the Trustees, recommended that the new auditorium building "be named after Ernest Martin Hopkins whose original concept it was" and that "the addition of up-to-date laboratories to the antiquated physics building, Wilder Hall, is an essential part of the modernization program for the plant." The Council joined the Trustees in their proposal that Hopkins Scholarships be established to provide a full college education for the sons of Dartmouth men lost in the war and that this plan "should be regarded as an integral part of the Hopkins tribute and included in these specific projects for which alumni support will be sought."

There are, then, these three parts of the Hopkins War Memorial program the Center which will bear the name of the College's distinguished and beloved President-Emeritus, the Hopkins Scholarships, and the enlarged physics building. Dartmouth men have already contributed very substantially toward the estimated total of about $3,000,000 required to achieve these objectives. Through past campaigns of the Alumni Fund a Reconversion Reserve Fund has been built up to its present balance of nearly $1,000,000. At their meeting last January is the Trustees, on recommendation of the Alumni Council, voted to appropriate this Fund toward the total financial requirements of the proposed program.

Under the leadership of John W. Hubbell '31 and Charles J. Zimmerman '23, special committees of alumni, with members located throughout the country, will seek support for the new buildings from friends outside the alumni body. There is still a long way to go to achieve the goal. Hopeful as campaigners are for securing non-alumni gifts to help solve the financial problem, the Alumni Council recognized the necessity of alumni support when it included among resolutions on the subject last January: "It cannot be predicted how successful this campaign among non-Dartmouth people, corporations, and foundations will be, but we have confidence that a substantial part of the total objective can be secured in this way. We recognize, however, that the alumni must be prepared to shoulder the major burden."

The Council concluded its recommendations on the entire program by stating: "Your committee suggests to the Trustees that construction of the Dartmouth Center, or Hopkins Hall, and of the physics building, should start as soon as building conditions permit. We further suggest that if the alumni and 'outside' campaigns are not fully successful in achieving the total goal within two years, the urgent need for the two projects be met by resorting to a loan, with efforts continued to provide the necessary balance; and if borrowing proves to be the only answer we predict that this campus would soon thereafter witness the largest bonfire in its history, on which the mortgage would be sent to the Happy Hunting Ground of the Indian sons of Samson Occom."

There were some earlier efforts to attract financial support for the auditorium and theater part of the plan. Although no definite campaign resulted, a national committee was formed ten years ago which succeeded in widely publicizing the opportunity for establishing a Center of Drama, Music, and Radio in the North Country. Professional people in the theatrical and movie fields became interested and testified to the promise of the plan. This rather elaborate vision has faded through the years. With excellent theater facilities available there would always be the opportunity to use them during the summer months but all the purposes of the structure have now turned in directions other than those of bringing Broadway to Hanover.

Over a period of two years, from 1937 to 1939, a special College committee worked with architect Jens Fredrick Larson to perfect the plans which had first been proposed by the Dartmouth House planning group in the late '20's. War interrupted the determination of President Hopkins and the Board of Trustees to move toward early completion of the building but in 1944 the planning committee was reactivated and an intensive study resulted in further refinements of the floor plans and life of the building. After his inauguration last November 1, President Dickey asked Prof. Russell R. Larmon '19 to head a local planning and building committee to serve in an advisory capacity to the Trustee Committee on Physical Development and Maintenance of the Plant, of which Edward S. French '06, president of the Boston and Maine Railroad, is chairman.

Mr. Dickey expressed to these committees, moving jointly toward final recommendations, his conviction that "the proposed auditorium building represents not only the most important present plant need of the College; it will be one of the last major buildings fronting on the campus. As such and by nature of its broad purpose, it is a matter of singular importance in the future development of both the plant and the life of the College. For these and other reasons the concept, functions and facilities of this building should be as nearly right for Dartmouth's present and future needs and purposes as the planning, imagination and devoted hard work of men can make them. In planning the use of this building for social, ceremonial, entertainment and instructional purposes, both curricular and extra-curricular, I hope that we may assure for it such a full measure of daily use by students, faculty and alumni generally that it will take its place in the affection of Dartmouth men alongside the other buildings on the campus which are best known and loved because they are a part of the daily life of the whole College I regard this as one of the major undertakings in the immediate years ahead and I assure you that the committee may count on the full cooperation of the Trustees and myself in carrying out its important task."

After six months of concentrated restudy and thorough exploration of many new ideas the committees unanimously reported the revised plans for the Hopkins Center to the Trustees who give their final endorsement at the Board's October meeting in Hanover.

PLANNING COMMITTEES have studied every possible location for the auditorium building. A review of the report to President Hopkins, dated November 4, 1944, reveals that the committee listed and evaluated the pros and cons of such possible sites as the Tuck Mall areas, the present location of Rollins Chapel and Richardson Hall, East Wheelock Street (across from the gym), Dewey Field, and other areas that might be large enough to provide for the new building. They returned to the southeast corner of the campus and voted unanimously in favor of the Bissell Hall site.

Accessibility was the most important single measuring stick for testing the qualifications of alternative sites. Some were judged to be architecturally good but too far from the campus for successful operation of the Center's varied activities. Some locations considered would present major problems in removing and replacing existing buildings, or in overcoming other obstacles. Parking has long been recognized as a bottleneck in the use of the new building except as steps are taken to open up new areas. The decision in favor of Bissell Hall was contingent upon removal of several of the old buildings in that section to provide increased parking space, and to develop some of the adjoining streets and College property. These new parking areas will also be useful to the Hanover Inn and for athletic contests.

There is no question about maximum accessibility of the Bissell Hall location for the student body, faculty, visitors, and the community. With the new emphasis upon faculty and alumni use of the Hopkins Center, the importance of its connection with the Inn has increased. It would be difficult to visualize the building serving the functions of multiple and daily use in any location except next to the Inn and on the campus. In concluding its recommendations for the Bissell Hall site the committee reported to President Hopkins; "Although a large college, Dartmouth has succeeded in retaining much of its intimacy of associations and unity through the years of growth. In general, the inner circle of buildings around the campus comprises the classroom, office, and library facilities, while a second circle in close proximity provides student residence. Although the local desire to walk only short distances from room to class to library to dining hall to room may be deplored, and might be dispelled by compulsion, it has undoubtedly helped to preserve the feeling that the College is small and compact Location of the great new center of many important activities away from the campus would, in our opinion, endanger the continued unity of student life that is fortunately one of Dartmouth's great assets."

President Dickey has stated his conviction that there is no alternative to the southeast corner of the campus. He views the functions of the Inn and the Center as integrally related. In discussing the location of the Center he recently said: "A special point that I want to make is that the revised project is a much larger question than simply the original one of where the auditorium building should be located and I have no question about the necessity of using this strategic site on the campus for the Hopkins Center,"

When will construction begin? Just possibly next summer but more likely the year after, according to the recent decision of the Trustee committee. It is hoped that building conditions, which will determine the date, may permit foundations for the Hopkins Center to be laid in 1947, or by the summer of 1948, with the building completed the following year.

REVISED EXTERIOR PLAN of the Hopkins Center prepared by J. Fredrick Larson, College architect. Shown in the drawing are the liberal expanse of windows in the new front, commanding a fine view of the campus, the connection with the Hanover Inn on all four levels, and the enclosed alumni promenade to the right.

COLLEGE STREET ENTRANCES to the Theatre and to the Drama and Music Departments, all of which are located in the southern part of the building, as shown in the first-floor plan on the opposite page.

INTERIOR DETAILS of the main floor of Hopkins Center are shown in the lower drawing, with the main entrance and double-duty lobby and Alumni Lounge at lower right. Above left is the mezzanine floor plan for the undergraduate lounges and social rooms, just above the Alumni Lounge, while above right is the fourth-floor plan of the front of the building where the faculty club rooms will be located. Shown on each level is the link with the Hanover Inn, with additional Inn rooms planned for the three top floors.

WHY A NEW AUDITORIUM WILL HELP Is shown in this picture of the October convocation exercises. Students listening to President Dickey's address jammed every inch of the balcony and filled the stairways.

[This is the first of several articles to bepresented by the ALUMNI MAGAZINE describing the Hopkins War Memorial program. The new physics building will bethe subject of a later article ED.]

SECRETARY OF THE COLLEGE