This is what a College ought to look like." Eisenhower said it when he visited Dartmouth in 1953, and professor of art history and senior lecturer Marlene Heck agrees.
Marlene Heck came to Dartmouth in 1990 with an undergraduate degree in history, a masters degree in architectural history and teaching experience from Texas A & M's architecture department. Heck teaches classes in both the art history and history departments on topics that range from modern architecture to architectural history, using the buildings themselves as her primary teaching instrument.
CP: What are your favorite architectural features of the campus?
MH: Of course, like everyone else I adore the Green, and I've come to really love both the coherence of Dartmouth Row, but also the variety of Wilson and the Hopkins Center. I can say when I first arrived at Dartmouth I was really offended by the Hopkins Center, but over the years I've really warmed to it as I've come to understand its place in the life of our community, and now I would go to the mat to make sure nothing happens to it. But the Green is, for me, Dartmouth.
CP: Who is your favorite architect of all time?
MH: Andrea Pelladio, the great Italian Renaissance architect; I'm teaching a course on him next term. It's the 500th anniversary of his birth this year, so we have a chance to think about him in new ways. We're taking someone who's familiar and very much part of the standard survey courses and seeing if we can rethink his place in the architectural system. There's going to be an exhibit at the Hood Museum and an exhibition in Rauner.
CP: How is the architecture in an academic setting different from architecture in other institutional contexts?
MH: Architecture always conveys a very important sense of an institution or a corporation. Our houses convey important information about us as people. Academic architecture shares something with all architecture in that it is an important conveyor of the values of an institution.
Also, we can read the history of an institution. This is different with college architecture because we sometimes grow slowly or sometimes in great spurts, and we need to keep an eye on contributing through the overall ensemble as well as considering those things that stand as important monuments. And we need to make sure we do not overwhelm the most important landmarks that have already been established; we don't want to do anything on or near the Green; we never want to alter in a dramatic way Dartmouth Hall or the Hopkins Center or Wilson or Rauner or Baker Library.
We can read the history of this institution that we love so much by its architecture. I have had so many students tell me they knew they were coming to Dartmouth the minute they got out of the car and they were on the Green. It is the epitome of a New England, small liberal arts institution. You just know from the buildings and the scale of the buildings and the landscapes that there is the intense focus on students and learning.
CP: I sometimes feel an eerie sense of those generations of people who have been here before me.
MH: That's palpable here more so than when you go to a much larger institution which has sprawling bullrings and a much larger scale. There, you don't have a sense of the individual. The buildings on the Green convey that continued and intense concentration on the individual.
CP: Would you say Dartmouth's campus has a common architectural theme running throughout?
MH: I would say that there is a common architectural fabric here. It's not that all the buildings look alike, because they don't, but through two centuries architects have been very careful to honor the original buildings -- to not try and outdo them, to maintain their scale and to build in complementary materials and complementary style. That has given us a cohesion that is far better than uniformity. If everything looked alike that would be boring, but the fact that there is variety yet cohesion protects the integrity of the campus.
CP: Any last thoughts on the campus architectural world?
MH: I am thrilled that, even though it's not a formal part of the instruction, there is now a lot of interest in architecture on the part of the students. We have studio art courses in design, we have architectural history courses and we are sending every year five or six students on to the very best architecture schools. Partly it is what they're learning here that makes them interested, but part of it is being here in this physically beautiful setting that has made them realize how important the architecture is. I can't imagine not being interested in architecture because we live in it, learn in it, are healed in it, and we seek solace in it in times of difficulty; we have to know about it.
