HOPKINS CENTER: A Progress Report

THROUGHOUT the fall, winter and early spring the College has lived with the giant excavation for the Hopkins Center, has seen it turned into a lake by heavy rains and into a snow bowl by winter blizzards; and in more recent months it has watched and listened to a piledriver pounding some 800 steel piles into the clay soil.

Now, with warm weather and dry ground prevailing, other things are beginning to happen at the site of the block-long Center. At the Lebanon Street end, foundations walls are being poured, and soon they will work their way north toward the campus and will outline the shape of the full structure. Steel work will follow and then will come the floor slabs. Bad weather has slowed building operations up to now, but the construction boss expects the work to progress rapidly from here on.

The social and cultural center that is rising at the southeast corner of the campus will show the benefits of many refinements in exterior and interior planning that have been made by the Hopkins Center Planning Committee, a group that has engaged in a continuous review since the Trustees approved the basic Harrison and Abramovitz design about three years ago. In external appearance (see opposite page) one major change has been the adoption of a vaulted roof treatment, using thinshell concrete. Some exterior glass areas have been replaced by brick walls, especially at the auditorium end; and at the northwest corner of the Center the moving of the groundfloor art galleries to a new location and the replanning of the floor above them, creating a new Faculty Room, has resulted in a revised design for the front of the Alumni Hall unit, adjacent to the Hanover Inn. An important addition, above the main art gallery, is a large roof terrace overlook- ing the campus and connected with both the student and faculty lounges on the second floor.

The refinement of interior plans has been carried out in numerous ways, both large and small. The theatre and studio-workshop units are relatively unaltered from the original plans, although in the former a new lobby has been designed and the shifting of the print gallery to a new location has made possible the addition of five management offices to the three called for in the original plan. These will include the Cehter director's office, just off the main lobby, and a new COSO office.

Ground-floor changes are most pronounced in the Alumni Hall unit. These include a new grouping of the art galleries and sculpture court, which has been somewhat enlarged; a newly designed student post office, located near the galleries, off the corridor leading to the snack bar and studios; and the new ground-floor location of the Drake Room, or ski hut, which formerly adjoined the Alumni Hall on the second floor. The secondfloor plan for this component of the Center is shown on Page 21, and gives an idea of the larger area now devoted to Alumni Hall and the Palmer Lounge through which one enters it. Alumni Hall will be connected with the Inn and can be served from there.

A major change involving the auditorium unit is the decision to move die Department of Music to the area below the large lecture-concert hall, thus permitting it to share the space and facilities with the musical activities that will be there as originally planned. An increase in usable floor space permits the new plan to include twelve instead of eight practice rooms; three group listening rooms and nine smaller ones, not previously planned; a larger library; and seven offices instead of three; all in addition to a choral room, instrumental room, jazz and folk-song lounge, two ensemble rooms, two directors' studios, and a broadcasting studio. Music courses can be conducted in the three large rooms which would otherwise be unoccupied, and a variety of seminar and small-group facilities will also be available to the Music Department.

Although television is not planned as an immediate part of the Hopkins Center program, conduits being put in during the present construction will make it possible later to do both black-and-white and three-color telecasts from every important part of the Center.

Many of the units where educational, creative and social activities will take place and provide potential television material now bear names, approved by the Dartmouth Trustees. A listing of all the named units to date and their donors appears on Pages 22 and 23.

Spaulding Auditorium will honor the late Governor Huntley N. Spaulding '27h of New Hampshire. The main theatre lobby, the actors' Green Room, and the jazz and folksong lounge will all memorialize Lt. Orlando John Buck '42, USAF, and are the gifts of his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ellsworth B. Buck '14. The Brookes Agora social lounge and snack bar is a memorial to Robert M. Brookes '59; the print gallery and exhibition rotunda, to Stanley H. Barrows, grandfather of Thomas P. McCrea '54 and Stanley B. McCrea '57; the auditorium lobby, to Professor Albert H. Washburn '19h and Florence Lincoln Washburn; the auditorium organ, to James D. Vail Jr. '20; the broadcasting studio, to Professor Charles A. Hardy '90; and the choral room, to Mrs. Marianne G. Faulkner of Woodstock, Vt.

Dartmouth's Hopkins Center was included in an exhibit of outstanding American theatre architecture which was sent to India in February to open a global tour under the auspices of the U. S. Information Agency. The exhibit was prepared by the New York Chapter of the American National Theatre and Academy, and includes plans prepared for New York, Washington, Dallas and Harvard.

This small cut shows the exterior design of the Center asprinted in our May 1957 issue. The large rendering aboveshows the revised design by Harrison and Abratnovitz withits vaulted roof lines, a new and harmonizing window treatment in front, and the changes at the right where an artgallery and faculty room have replaced the units there before.

An artist's conception of the Faculty Room as seen from the roof terrace which overlooks the campus. The room has been added in the revision of the second-floor plans.

The Jaffe-Friede Gallery on the ground floor of the Center, just to the right of thetheatre unit and also near the student post office, has a long curving wall. It will provide an accessible room for displaying items in the College's permanent art collection.

New ground-floor plan showing the Center's four main components: (I) theatre; (2) galleries and post office, with theDrake Room (ski hut) at right and Alumni Hall and Faculty Room above; (3) studios and workshops; and (4) Spaulding Auditorium, below which are music rooms and offices for the Department of Music, which is to be moved there.

Artist's version of Alumni Hall and, below, a floor plan showing its relation to other second-floor rooms.