Sanborn: a good place for a secret society to gather

The most interesting lecture I’ve ever attended was one on the history of Dartmouth College’s architecture. Seated with fellow members of my secret society (yeah, yeah, it’s not a secret anymore) in ornate Sanborn Hall on a dim winter night, the talk had an aura of mystery around it even before Professor Marlene Heck began to speak.

College is a strange institution in the United States for many reasons, not least of which is its inherent long-term memory loss. We arrive one year assuming things have always been a certain way and leave four short years later, assuming they will always stay the same. Of course that is not the case. But when an architectural project intrudes upon those four years, it feels as though the very earth is shifting beneath our feet.

Professor Heck’s talk illuminated all the ways in which Dartmouth has changed over the centuries of its existence. The green, now so sacred as an open space it would be unthinkable to have a building there, once hosted the president’s house. A plan for the river once included a huge outdoor amphitheater. She also talked about plans that were in the budget in 2007, ones that have since shifted social foci and destroyed things that seemed permanent, ones that have already made “my Dartmouth” a thing of the past.

My favorite story of the evening was about a former natural history museum that housed dinosaur bones and taxidermied animals. At some point, the college decided the building was no longer necessary, and the fossils were shipped out to other locations. The museum was prime real estate on campus, and what was really needed was a library, an axis mundi that would recognize the importance of books in such a community. The library would go where the museum had stood. But what to do with this large, existing building? The solution: a construction crew dug a huge hole right in front of the museum and, after emptying it of all its treasures, pushed the building into the hole. When maintenance crews were called in a few years ago to work on Baker Library’s plumbing, they dug in front of the library only to find an archaeological site just a half-century old.

It’s strange to think how quickly we become history.

The bones of another building are buried in front of Baker tower