Dartblog

I can’t comment on the interior of the College’s new Black Arts building, but the outside of the structure is now complete, and the College’s latest addition to Hanover’s cityscape leaves a lot to be desired. The façade is a potpourri of slate, architectural stone, molded concrete, glass and zinc; and needless to say, a breathless spokesman will one day explain to us the symbolic references for each material. So it goes with post-modernism.

The slate, to which we have referred in the past, has a lot in common with rusting battlefield wreckage, according to a faculty member in a position to know, and when you add in the stenciled tree images on the central windows of the atrium, it is clear to this viewer that the building will become dated pretty fast.

More seriously, the Black Arts building seems an effort by mediocre administration minds to impose on Hanover an edgy, avant-garde structure, at least as they define it. Ol’ Jim Wright’s street sensibility, which brought us Berry Library’s New England proletarian mill/municipal hospital aesthetic, is trying hard here to assert the point that, no, Hanover is not an intellectual backwater — we can be progressive, too.

The result of that type of thinking is equally evident at the entrance to town on Wheelock Street. Just before you reach Main Street after driving up from the Ledyard Bridge, on your right, stands a boxy edifice that curiously recalls the Black Arts center. The 1971 Banwell Building was considered by its defenders back in the day to be thrillingly modern; its detractors decried its hideous boxiness and vulgar materials. Are you thrilled as you look at it today?