Unwrapped

If you glanced up at the Baker Bell Tower anytime in the last four months or so, you might’ve mistakenly thought it was noon or midnight. Originally built in 1928, the tower has been under renovation since mid-June, and wrapped on all four sides since mid-July in a custom-made scrim that mimics how the tower appeared before work began. (The covering depicted the time at 12 o’clock.) The idea was to hide the eyesore of scaffolding and construction on Dartmouth’s most iconic building.

Though custom-printed scrims are normally reserved for hiding maintenance work on landmarks such as the U.S. Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., and are more commonly found in Europe, which has a longer history of preserving historic structures and monuments, the team behind the $4-million Baker Tower redux decided to spring for a printed scrim that cost $8,000 more than a run-of-the-mill covering, and $45,000 overall. “Construction sites are a pain in the butt—they’re loud and noisy and ugly and I thought, ‘We don’t have to do it that way,’ ” says Lisa Hogarty, VP of campus planning and facilities. “We wanted to have an elegant, professionally set-up site that communicates how important the tower is to Dartmouth. The scrim was our ode to the elegance of European construction sites.”

Designed by Boston-based firm Shawmut Design and Construction, which was also responsible for giving the building a new copper roof and state-of-the-art control and lighting systems, the scrim consisted of 36 panels and perfectly imitated the color of the sky behind the building. “Scrims are important because they create a protected work environment for workers who are sometimes doing delicate restorations,” says Carl Jay, director of historic preservation at Shawmut. “But if you see a tower scrim in a traditional black or green, it looks really weird. Regardless of how nice you make it, people realize something’s missing from the sky.” As the scrim and scaffolding came down in sections, starting the first week of September and continuing as the work was finalized during several weeks, the newly completed tower, with working clock, was slowly revealed from top to bottom, unsheathed just in time for Homecoming.

Tiffanie Wen