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"What a College Should Look Like"
A Conversation with Dartmouth's Unofficial Architectural Guru, Scott Meacham '95
Forget the prosaic title. The Campus Guide: Dartmouth College (Princeton Architectural Press 2008) is an indispensable companion when you're visiting campus, and a pleasure to read even when you're not. Author Scott Meacham '95 is a keen observer, diligent researcher, and a graceful writer.
A double major in English and studio art at Dartmouth, Meacham went on to earn a master's in architectural history (1998) and a law degree (2004) from the University of Virginia. He is a senior attorney with the National Legal Research Group and lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Camden. Meacham is also proprietor of the website Dartmo: The Buildings of Dartmouth College, a frequently updated survey of the evolving campus environment. Both in his book and online, he covers his subject, a campus President Eisenhower described as "what a college should look like," from its origins in the 1760s through to buildings planned but not yet under construction, with a wealth of detail—and not a little verve and humor.
Of Thel, for example, a contemporary sculpture across College Street from Baker-Berry Library, he writes, "The archipelago of irregular hollow pyramids made from white-enameled Cor-Ten steel panels and webbing drew comparisons to an outcropping of New Hampshire granite, a New England church, Caspar David Friedrich's 1824 painting The Polar Sea, and an airplane crash."
Even those who know the campus well will find themselves looking at it in new ways when he likens the facade of architect Jens Larson's Memorial Field to a "great Roman aqueduct" that is "both a severe proscenium terminating the Lebanon Street vista and an open gateway to the football spectacle behind it." All the world's a stage, indeed.
How did you become interested in Dartmouth's architecture?
I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, which is a very new city and prone to earthquakes, so when I arrived on campus I felt lucky to be given the use of all these old brick buildings. But I wasn't really convinced that anything less than a world-renowned work of architecture could deserve serious study until I started taking architecture classes in the Studio Art Department. Jack Wilson, an architect in the Office of Planning, Design, and Construction, focused on design problems facing the College planners at the time. We designed visual arts centers on Lebanon Street and monuments that would divert foot traffic away from the tree roots at the southwest corner of the Green. We studied the history of each site, and I was fascinated by the idea that so many of the places around campus that appeared familiar and timeless actually used to be quite different.
Did you start Dartmo.com in 1995 with the intention of writing a book about Dartmouth?
I didn't, actually. At first I was just trying to keep track of buildings and the organizations they housed over time. I compiled some notes on what was built where, and whether it was demolished or moved or renamed, mostly to help me keep things straight. At various times, for example, Dartmouth owned two separate downtown hotels that it called South Hall, and they are easy to confuse when you are reading College histories or looking at old maps. I started posting some small essays on planning and history online in 1995. I didn't start thinking about a book until 2000 or so.
You note in the book that the first building on campus was an eighteen-foot-square "hutt of logs" the fifty-nine-year-old Rev. Eleazar Wheelock had constructed in 1770. While doing research, did you ever get the sense he was ready to give up the whole college-in-the-wilderness idea after spending a New Hampshire winter in the "hutt"?
Wheelock certainly complained about the conditions. He also proposed to move the whole College to New York during a dispute with the Town of Hanover a few years after arriving. But I didn't get the sense that anything would have made him give up the overall project. He was compelled to establish the College. And his life was more comfortable than almost everyone else's. Most of the students were sleeping on pine boughs during the first days of the College in the fall of 1770. Wheelock managed to make the harsh conditions part of his fund-raising strategy, and you get the sense that he was even a little proud of living in a building "without stone, brick, glass or nail," as he wrote. Beginning in a state of nature made the College more purely original.
If you were leading a tour, what two or three buildings would be "must-see" inside and out?
Baker Library is the one "must-see." It's the main library, and its tower is the tallest piece of architecture around, marking what is basically the center of the campus. Baker also has the largest collection of interior spaces that have been given special decorative attention, often as memorials. The Tower Room is the best example and is worth strolling through. The College History Room at the west entrance is tiny but is the closest thing Dartmouth has to a museum of its own past. The stacks are very utilitarian, but I always find their design comforting, with their narrow stairs and dim lighting in places. The stacks are inspiring just to wander through.
Rauner Library and Sanborn House are next to Baker Library and are worth visiting for some of the same reasons. But if I could lead a tour down Tuck Drive and inside the Ledyard Canoe Club, that would be the second building that I would say a visitor must see. There is no place on campus that is so connected to the outdoors or has a design that is so strongly influenced by students. Ledyard stands on the riverbank next to the Ledyard Monument, which actually predates the building by several decades. It's pleasant on its own terms, and feels quite removed from campus, even though it's not that far from the Green. Club members have covered the walls of the meeting room with trophies, signs, and mementos from past trips. It's not very big and is very informal, but I think it's Dartmouth's truest student clubhouse. The place just exudes a whimsical and slightly crazy sense of adventure.
A couple years ago, you wrote a paper on "Old Division Football, The Indigenous Mob Soccer Of Dartmouth College." Any chance there's a book on the social history of the College in the offing?
I wouldn't rule it out, but the book I'm trying to work on at the moment is a monograph on Lamb & Rich, the campus architects from about 1895 to 1917. But someone should do a social history, or any kind of history, since Dartmouth's last really thorough history is about forty years old now. I have thought of collecting articles for a Dartmouth encyclopedia, and I know the Special Collections staff was thinking about creating that kind of project online a few years ago. Too many interesting stories in Dartmouth's past end up being forgotten or receiving only half-remembered overviews in the student newspapers. Even topics that are sometimes controversial today don't seem to have well-researched and widely available papers devoted to them.