What the Project Means

THE meaning of truly great enterprises is both simple and complex and therefore always also somewhat subtle. So it is with the group of buildings comprising the new Hopkins Center project.

In the simplest sense the four main buildings within the group will mean:

Instructional facilities to permit teaching by lectures and modern visual presentations of the large "common-experience" courses, presently the freshman and senior class courses, "The Individual and the College" and "Great Issues."

Creative arts facilities to bring within the daily educational exposure of all Dartmouth students the beauty, the fun and the plain hard work of human enjoyment at its liberating best.

Fellowship facilities to foster and serve the unique experience in "togetherness" that characterizes Dartmouth as a place for students, faculty, alumni, townspeople, parents and friends.

These central purposes of the facilities are bound together within principles aimed at featuring:

A. Multiple use of all facilities, e.g., the theater for dramatic productions and for use as a classroom in the mornings for lecture classes up to 450; the auditorium for large lecture courses and for concerts up to 900; the large garden court for outdoor concerts and dramatic productions; the Top of the Hop as a social lounge and for small instrumental and choral group recitals and for dances; Alumni Hall for alumni banquets, faculty dances, undergraduate club meetings and dinners, and local civic group affairs; all the lobbies and corridors for everchanging local and traveling exhibitions.

B. "Side-walk superintendent" opportunities in all the creative arts areas (theater, music, studios and workshops) to catch curiosity, invite interest, inform, and create enjoyment, maybe even the desire for a "try at it myself."

C. The unity of learning and life and the relatedness of all creativity, e.g., by a planned pattern of internal circulations tying together the theater, galleries, workshops, studios, class lectures, social comings and goings and daily mail calls; also by bringing the fine arts and the craft workshops together in proximity and occasionally in collaborative work for the theater.

D. Strategic use of this crossroads site both as a focal point for drawing together the college community and as a year-around outlook, itself creative and spacious in design, featuring the traditional activity and beauty of the central campus.

The full reach of this unprecedented project is beyond present measurement or prediction. The acute specific needs for lecture halls, for a theater, for musical, arts and fellowship facilities are known and will be well met. But beyond these established things, as the purposes and principles of this project are combined under professionally managed educational operation of the Center, Dartmouth has good reason to hope that she will have pioneered another successful venture in enlarging the dimensions of liberal learning for an entire college community.