HANOVER — The renovated and expanded Hopkins Center for the Arts includes a new recital hall and a dance performance space between the existing arts center and the Hanover Inn, adding a new feature to the view from the green.
The prominent new wing was among the details of the project released by the college on Thursday. The preliminary design describes significant changes to the 60-year-old arts center, and a refined estimate shows the project will cost $88 million, about $13 million more than estimates from a year ago.
The project, which calls for 15,000 square feet of new construction and 55,000 square feet of renovated space, is slated to break ground this fall, with construction expected to last until early 2025. While the project takes place, the Hop will hold programs elsewhere, Mary Lou Aleskie, director of the Hopkins Center, said Thursday.
“We do plan to be not only around the campus but around the community,” Aleskie said.
Among the first venues to be renovated will be Spaulding Auditorium, which will enable the Hop to host performances there while other spaces are renovated, Aleskie said.
Alterations to the Hop include the removal of the college’s mailroom, or Hinman boxes. The Darling Courtyard, inside the Hop, and the Zahm Courtyard, nestled between the Hop and the Hanover Inn where the new wing would sit, also would be removed.
Zahm Courtyard, which was renovated a decade ago, houses the majority of Dartmouth’s memorials to its war dead, including troops killed in World War II, Korea and Vietnam, as well as a Sept. 11 memorial.
“They are being relocated on campus,” Aleskie said. “I don’t think there are final decisions on exactly where, but they are being preserved.”
Alumni Hall, a meeting room tucked into the Hop’s second floor, would be converted into a multi-use black box theater, and the entry to the Hop will be redesigned.
Other spaces in the celebrated arts center will be improved but will keep their familiar contours, including Spaulding Auditorium, the Top of the Hop and the basement workshops for woodworking, ceramics and jewelrymaking.
While the estimated cost has climbed from $75 million last year to $88 million now, donations toward the project have climbed even more, from $25 million in February 2021 to $50.1 million now. The higher cost is attributable to more thorough estimates and to the identification of needs not included in the original plans, Aleskie said.
“There’s an appetite for the project,” among the alumni and the wider community, she said.
Among the contributors are notable Dartmouth graduates in the arts, including TV producer David Benioff, actors Connie Britton, Rachel Dratch, Mindi Kaling and Sharon Washington, and movie producer Chris Meledandri. The college is still looking for a lead gift, the kind of big-money pledge that could add a name to that of Ernest Martin Hopkins, who served as Dartmouth’s 11th president from 1916 to 1945.
When it opened in 1962, the Hopkins Center was among the first university centers of its kind, bringing all the arts under one roof. Wallace Harrison’s design prefigured his work on the Metropolitan Opera, which opened in 1966. The New York office of Snøhetta, a global architecture and design firm, is designing the renovation and expansion.
Dartmouth’s development over the past decade of an Arts District, which includes the Black Family Visual Arts Center on Lebanon Street and the renovated and expanded Hood Museum of Art, indicates how much interest in the arts have grown over the past 60 years.
Students are the main force behind the renovation plan, Aleskie said. Waiting lists for art classes have doubled in the five years she’s been at Dartmouth, and the college is home to a range of student ensembles clamoring for practice space. Dartmouth has given birth to notable dance ensembles and new work in dance despite not having a dedicated space for the art form, Aleskie noted.
The plans released Thursday are still being refined as the project moves toward construction. Aleskie promised a “very robust fall term of performances” before the Hop closes, around Thanksgiving, for more than two years.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
