Dartmouth given $50M for arts center

Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, has received what it is calling the largest gift in the school’s history – $50 million from an anonymous family – to help fund construction of a new visual arts center, the school has announced. “Initial estimated construction cost” of the center is $45 million, the school spokesman tells me.

Machado and Silvetti Associates of Boston – which has worked on the Getty Villa in Malibu and an addition at Bowdoin College – is completing construction documents for the 99,000-square-foot structure. Construction is expected to begin in 2010 and be finished in fall 2012.

Dartmouth’s visual arts center is expected to offer teaching and production studios, classrooms, exhibition space, a 50-seat screening room, an auditorium theater for film projection, and faculty and administrative offices. It will be located on Lebanon Street near Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Performing Arts and Hood Museum of Art, creating an arts hub on the campus. Plans call for the visual arts center to be erected on land that has been occupied by a parking lot, residence hall and a building mainly used by the visual arts departments.