Hopkins Center for the Arts, the venerable performing arts and studio complex at Dartmouth, opened earlier this month after a major renovation and expansion by Snøhetta. When it was first constructed in 1962, Harrison & Abramovitz’s landmark brought superb facilities and introduced artistic culture to the then all-male college in Hanover, New Hampshire, home to the fraternity upon which the film Animal House was based. In addition to remodeling the existing auditoria, galleries, and cafe, Snøhetta has added three major spaces for theatre and dance.
It is impossible to underestimate the importance of Wallace Harrison’s Hopkins Center (the Hop) to Dartmouth. Often referred to as a trial run for the architect’s Metropolitan Opera, Hopkins Center was an unqualified success in an understated way. While its five arches were echoed at the Metropolitan, the brick walls and Kahn-like barrel-vaulted roofs seemed more domesticated, less pompous. Just as Harrison’s Hopkins Center was designed to signal Dartmouth’s embrace of the arts, Snøhetta’s expansion represents the 21st century’s understanding of the arts.
The crown jewel of Snøhetta’s new work at Hopkins Center is the dance studio, and it soars. A nearly perfect cube raised upon an elevated podium, it majestically looks over The Green, the heart of this classic New England campus. Its delicate twisted steel arches and giant sheets of glass frame Baker Library, the handsome exercise in Georgian that serves as the college’s signature building. Furthermore, it makes a respectful pairing with the existing Hop.
The oxblood-colored, folded-metal panels that wrap the exterior of the dance studio offer a counterpoint to the masonry structures along this end of The Green. The studio’s glazed front looks “like a lighthouse,” according to design principal Craig Dykers, “a beacon to bring people in.” Skillful at adding to older architectural monuments, Snøhetta presents a jewel box that nicely complements Harrison’s Formalism.
Delicate yet daring, full-height arched mullions frame the vista of The Green and the library. The tuning-fork motif is carried around to the exterior of the black box theatre, which sits at the rear of the new wing. For those familiar with the ways in which Snøhetta can enliven a wall, the white panels disappoint, looking like something Yamasaki ordered over the telephone.
The interior lobby and the stairs that lead up to the black box theatre and the dance studio are another triumph. The staircase, intriguingly, is both intimate and monumental, as it climbs the walls, defining an open and flexible space that could be the stage for spontaneous performances and exhibitions. Beyond the gravitas of the entrance hall’s remit, its light oak infuses the double-height space with the inviting warmth of a lakeside cabin in Finland.
The distinguished, sports-obsessed school in near-Nordic New Hampshire coupled with the exceptionally sensitive design firm ought to have been a natural marriage. Dartmouth, however, has a history of hiring excellent architects, but then lacking the aspirational bravery to allow those designers to reach their potential. The $128 million Hopkins Center remake offers brilliant acoustics (“the unsung hero of architecture,” Dykers declares), clever details such as vertical wood panels that mimic a stage curtain, re-mastered circulation, and “the most exceptional glass we’d ever done.” So, where is the childlike glee one expects from Snøhetta? Did the college ask too much of the architects? There’s a sense that boldness was sacrificed for fitting everything in. For starters, the college’s insistence on the “Forum” entrance between the two wings destroyed Harrison’s handsome parti. There was a limited competition of A-list firms for the Hop makeover, but one wonders if Dartmouth’s innate conservatism hampers notable architectural achievement once the famous name is hired. (Colleges often demonstrate a selective amnesia about the also-rans, lest the final choice not seem divinely inspired.)
When post-war universities, such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton and MIT, turned their campuses into laboratories of contemporary architecture, less wealthy Dartmouth got mildly adventurous by commissioning Pier Luigi Nervi to do a field house and a hockey rink, while Venturi Scott Brown expanded the beloved Baker Library. VSB’s unpopular work for Dartmouth caused a backlash; the college retreated and disbanded its design review committee. Firms such as Robert A. M. Stern and Centerbrook delivered anodyne brick piles. Charles Moore’s delightful postmodern art museum was hamfistedly enlarged by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, work that did no favors for either part of the museum.
Snøhetta was a great choice–they have designed some knock-your-socks-off art centers at schools as diverse as Bowling Green State in Ohio and Canada’s Queen’s University. Alas, Dartmouth seems to lack confidence as a patron of architecture–there is just not a strong culture of design here. Just as the building of Hopkins Center initially marked the college’s foray into the arts six decades ago, Snøhetta’s remodeling and enlargement means more events, more dance, music, and theater. Snøhetta’s work carries with it the hope of encouraging an increasingly informed architectural I.Q. for the college.
William Morgan studied architecture at Columbia, and has taught at Princeton and Brown. He has written extensively on campus design, including Academia: Collegiate Gothic Architecture in the United States.
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