Architectural Digest

EVEN WITHOUT A PROFESSIONAL PROGRAM, THE COLLEGE INSPIRES GRADUATES TO FIND CAREERS IN DESIGN.

It happens all the time: High school students on tours catch a glimpse of the Green after cresting West Wheelock Street and decide their first choice is Dartmouth.

Even as the admissions office benefits from the arrangement of columns, white-painted bricks and a bell tower around a crisp Green, so, too, does the field of architecture, alumni say, as the campus stokes young people to ponder the relationship between structure and setting.

There’s a lot to learn on those cross-campus strolls. From the buildings of Dartmouth Row, with their pronounced Georgian and Greek Revival details, to the boxier, more prosaic Choates firstyear residences, passersby can sample more than three centuries of American styles—even those that initially fail to please the eye.

Yet for all that undergraduate exposure, students have not been able to stick around to learn the finer points of architecture after graduation. Unlike Ivies Penn and Harvard, for instance, Dartmouth doesn’t offer a master’s in the subject.

The absence of an architecture school has not, however, deterred those interested in pursuing the field, as the small sampling of architects featured here makes clear. For decades the College has continued to produce top designers, many of whom cite their undergraduate art classes, as well as ecology, engineering and geography offerings, for galvanizing their career interests.

The last few years seem to have been a particularly fruitful time, eclipsing past golden ages of heightened interest in architecture such as the early 1970s, when the Hopkins Center boasted a critical mass of students, teachers and visiting artists.

On average, 10 students in each class now go on to architecture school, versus about two in each class through the 1990s, says Marlene Heck, an art history and history professor. Other, nonarchitecture students now gravitate to Arc@D, a new design-focused student group, she says. This heightened level of interest, which parallels this decade’s building boom, is fueled by academic offerings of about 20 relevant art history, drawing, geography, environmental studies and economics classes offered each term.

“Once students realize a building is more than a building, that it’s an expression of culture that can tell us so much about how people lived and what they valued,” Heck says, “it opens up a world that’s fascinating.”

On the following pages we showcase just a few of the College’s many alumni architects.

This page: Boston Logan International Airport 9/11 Memorial (Moskow Linn Architects) Opposite: Poly International Plaza, Guangzhou, China (Skidmore Owings & Merrill)

C.J. Hughes is based in New York City. He has written about architecture for The New York Times and Architectural Record.