Nervi Designs a Field House
THE Dartmouth Trustees at their April 22 meeting authorized an immediate start on the construction of a new field house, key unit in the athletic plant expansion for which funds were raised in the Capital Gifts Campaign.
What gave special excitement to this not unexpected announcement was the news that the field house has been designed by Pier Luigi Nervi, the world-famous Italian engineer-designer, who is one of the towering figures of twentieth century architecture. His Dartmouth design is a rectangular adaptation of his circular Palazzetto dello Sport (small sports palace) erected in Rome for the 1960 Olympic Games.
Nervi is famous for his huge vaulted or domed structures of reinforced concrete, and the field house's central requirement of a large unobstructed ground area is exactly the sort of problem that he has solved in his own country with unique success and with structural innovations that have combined speed and economy with forms of unusual grace and beauty.
Foundation work for the new field house, to cost in excess of one million dollars, is scheduled to begin about May 1, and completion of the building is expected by the fall of 1962. The Boston architectural firm of Campbell and Aldrich is associated with Nervi in the project, and the building will be done by the Wexler Construction Company, which previously has successfully bid on two dormitory projects, the new Dartmouth Medical School, and the mathematics-psychology center.
The Dartmouth field house will be Nervi's first complete stucture in this country, and for that reason it is certain to attract great interest in the architectural world. His only other American commission under construction is a reinforced-concrete roof over one section of the bus terminal that the Port of New York Authority is now building at the Manhattan end of the George Washington Bridge.
The field house in Hanover will be located on Memorial Field, probably at the southernmost end. It will have an overall length of 358 feet, a width of 261 feet, and a height of 62 feet at the center of its arched roof. These dimensions will give an enclosed ground area of a little over two acres, or an area nearly equal to that of two football fields.
According to the present ground plan, the fully enclosed field house will accommodate a baseball infield; batting and pitching cages; an eleven-laps-to-the-mile track of wood or com- position material; a three-lane straightaway track running the width of the building, with possible enlargement to six lanes when needed; a pole vault area, as well as areas for the high jump and weight throw; and a lacrosse practice area. Since the present east wing of the gymnasium will eventually be converted into a swimming pool, the indoor trak facilities and other athletic activities now centered there will be transferred to the field house, but in a much expanded and improved way.
The field house will be flexible enough to permit other athletic uses, including indoor football practice when the weather is bad, but it is being built primarily to replace the gym wing and as an answer to the handicap Dartmouth spring teams have faced for years in not being able to get outdoors until well into April.
In addition to its athletic functions, the field house will have a special and very welcome virtue in being available for Commencement exercises when inclement weather cancels the traditional outdoor program on the Baker Library lawn. It is estimated that more than 6,000 persons can be seated in the ground area that will be available for an occasion such as Commencement or an academic convocation.
Nervi's design for the field house calls for one side wall to be of red brick, in harmony with the surrounding buildings of the athletic plant, and the other to be of glass. A corridor will run the full length of the structure on the glass side. Along the brick wall there will be storage rooms and areas, offices and coaches' quarters, a kitchen, toilets, and a first-aid room. The ends of the building will be covered with an opaque transite material, with a belt of glass near the ground level.
The architecturally dramatic aspect of the field house will be its arched roof, constructed, in characteristic Nervi style, of a latticework of diamond-shaped, reinforced-concrete units, precast on the ground. With the aid of a movable scaffold, the units will be placed in position and then joined with steel reinforcing rods and concrete in situ poured in the channels between the units. This form of prefabricated roof construction was introduced by Nervi when he built the cupola of his famous Main Exhibition Hall in Turin in 1948-49, and it was repeated in a number of subsequent structures, notably his second Turin exhibition hall, the Tortona and Bologna warehouses, the Chianciano baths, and the smaller Olympic arena.
The arched roof will have an exterior covering, but inside the field house the visible underside of the roof units will form an unbroken sweep of concave ceiling criss-crossed with concrete ribs in a uniform diamond pattern. This so-called lamella vault, virtually a Nervi trademark, is an aesthetic dividend that came with his invention of a new way to gain lightness and strength with prefabricated concrete units, and the Italian designer has learned to achieve unique and strikingly beautiful effects, some of which are illustrated on the following pages. Basically a structural engineer, Nervi gathers his ceiling stress lines at the sides and corners where concrete buttresses or other forms support them.
Early last month Nervi flew to the United States to take part in the centennial program at M.1.T., and on Sunday, April 9, he made a special trip from Boston to Hanover to inspect the Memorial Field site of the field house and to discuss design and construction matters with College officers and with the American architects and engineers who are associated with him in the project. Paul Gugliotta of New York, a former student of Nervi's at the School of Architecture, University, of Rome, accompanied him to Hanover as interpreter.
Among those who took part in the Hanover conference were Richard W. Olmsted '32, business manager of the College and directing head of the plant expansion program; Carmen diStefano, representing Campbell and Aldrich, the associated architects; Phillip R. Jackson '43, general manager of the Wexler Construction Company, the builders; and John H. Minnich '27, former Thayer School professor, who is to be in charge of the foundation engineering, a phase of the construction with which Prof. S. Russell Stearns '37 of Thayer School will also be associated.
Following the business meeting in the basement conference room of Massachusetts Hall, where Nervi was able to inspect a scale model of the entire Dartmouth plant, including his own design for the field house (see this month's cover picture), a reception and buffet supper in honor of the distinguished Italian engineer-designer was held at the Outing Club House. This was attended by College administrative officers, including those of the DCAC, members of the Thayer School and Art Department faculties, professors from several other departments, and a number of Hanover architects.
As will be noted from the photographs in this issue, Nervi is no longer a young man, except in his ideas. He will reach his 70th birthday next month. His basic training was that of a structural engineer, and when he began to design unprecedented structures that no one knew how to build, he established his own construction firm and built them himself. Since 1932 he has been head of the Rome construction firm of Nervi and Bartoli, and since 1947 he also has been Professor of Technology and Structural Techniques at the School of Architecture, University of Rome.
Nervi's international reputation rests on utilitarian structures such as stadia, hangars, factories, warehouses, and exhibition halls, although he collaborated on the UNESCO buildings in Paris with Marcel Breuer and Bernard Zehrfuss, and also on the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan with Gio Ponti and Alberto Rosselli. Long known as one of the major architectural originators of this modern age, Nervi came to more popular attention throughout the world as a result of his three 1960 Olympic structures in Rome: the small sports palace, the large sports palace, and the Flaminio Stadium, on which his architect son, Antonio, collaborated.
Nervi had his first big opportunity to carry out his design and construction innovations when he did the Municipal Stadium in Florence in 1930-32. Then followed a series of radically unique concrete hangars for the Italian air force at Orvieto, Orbetello and Torre del Lago from 1935 through 1943. His stunning main exhibition hall at Turin followed in 1948-49. This hall, with a span of 330 feet, had to be erected in eight months, and to execute such a large building in such a short time Nervi used one of his most famous innovations, ferro-cemento.
A second Turin exhibition hall, Salon C, was erected in 1949-50, and other major Nervi creations that followed were the government salt warehouse at Tortona, 1950-51; factories in Bologna and Rome, 1951-53; the baths at Chianciano, 1952; the municipal tramway at Turin, 1954; the Central Station at Naples, 1954; the UNESCO buildings at Paris, 1953-57; the Fiat factories at Turin, 1954-55; the Pirelli Building in Milan, 1955-59; and the Olympic buildings in Rome, 1956-59.
Another artist's concept of the building's exterior appearance.
THE SKETCH at the top of the page is an artist's concept of the interior of the new Dartmouth field house with its roof of precast cast reinforced-concrete units.
