Dartmouth College, Visual Arts Center

Hanover, New Hampshire

Firm

Richard Burck Associates

Client

Dartmouth College

Area

40,500 sq.ft.

Total Cost

$1,775,000

The new Visual Arts Center consolidates Dartmouth College’s Studio Art and Film and Television Studies departments in a single location. The campus landscape for this building is designed to be a setting for sculpture, as well as an exterior extension of the Visual Arts Center’s ground-floor-level social and public spaces.

The site design provides accessible passage to a new entry for the adjacent Hood Museum of Art and other related programs in the Hopkins Center. This new arts plaza serves as a formal southern entrance for the town of Hanover to the Dartmouth campus arts precinct. The Visual Arts Center activates the urban fabric with the development of courtyard spaces, the location of the building, and appropriate entrances onto Lebanon Street.

Sustainable site strategies include the harvesting of condensate from mechanical equipment and the collection of stormwater from the building roof to be used for irrigation of planting areas. Street trees are irrigated by stormwater runoff from adjacent sidewalks that is then directed to soil volumes by way of a permeable paver system.