It happens all the time: High school students on tours catch a glimpse of the Green after cresting West Wheelock Street and decide their first choice is Dartmouth.

Even as the admissions office benefits from the arrangement of columns, white-painted bricks and a bell tower around a crisp Green, so, too, does the field of architecture, alumni say, as the campus stokes young people to ponder the relationship between structure and setting.

There’s a lot to learn on those cross-campus strolls. From the buildings of Dartmouth Row, with their pronounced Georgian and Greek Revival details, to the boxier, more prosaic Choates first-year residences, passersby can sample more than three centuries of American styles—even those that initially fail to please the eye.

Yet for all that undergraduate exposure, students have not been able to stick around to learn the finer points of architecture after graduation. Unlike Ivies Penn and Harvard, for instance, Dartmouth doesn’t offer a master’s in the subject. The absence of an architecture school has not, however, deterred those interested in pursuing the field, as the small sampling of architects featured here makes clear. For decades the College has continued to produce top designers, many of whom cite their undergraduate art classes, as well as ecology, engineering and geography offerings, for galvanizing their career interests.

The last few years seem to have been a particularly fruitful time, eclipsing past golden ages of heightened interest in architecture such as the early 1970s, when the Hopkins Center boasted a critical mass of students, teachers and visiting artists. On average, 10 students in each class now go on to architecture school, versus about two in each class through the 1990s, says Marlene Heck, an art history and history professor. Other, non-architecture students now gravitate to Arc@D, a new design-focused student group, she says. This heightened level of interest, which parallels this decade’s building boom, is fueled by academic offerings of about 20 relevant art history, drawing, geography, environmental studies and economics classes offered each term.

“Once students realize a building is more than a building, that it’s an expression of culture that can tell us so much about how people lived and what they valued,” Heck says, “it opens up a world that’s fascinating.”

Here we showcase just a few of the College’s many alumni architects.

Bill McDonough ’73
Firm: William McDonough + Partners, Charlottesville, Virginia
Notable Work: Environmental Defense Fund headquarters, New York City; master plan for six blocks of lower 9th Ward, New Orleans; Google office expansion, Mountain View, California
On Architecture: “You know the sustainability movement has taken effect when it becomes localized.”
On Dartmouth: “Respect for the natural world was part of the Dartmouth experience.”
Major: Visual studies with art history
Grad School: Yale

Back when “green” meant “inexperienced” McDonough was urging companies to waste less energy by putting plants on their roofs, as at a Silicon Valley Gap office, or by tapping underground heat, as with a Nike building in the Netherlands. That conservation-minded approach was partly inspired by a childhood stay in Tokyo, where he watched oxcarts haul away human waste to use as fertilizer. Subsequent time in Hong Kong, where 6 million people share 40 square miles, he says, was “like living in the future, where crowded cities will share meager resources.”

Less publicized is how McDonough’s philosophy was also shaped by his years in the Upper Valley, where he became fascinated by the Connecticut River’s abandoned mill dams. He has renovated four of them to generate electricity.

On campus the Hopkins Center was his axis. Professors including artists-in-residence Walker Evans, the photographer, as well as Hannes Beckmann, a Bauhaus pioneer who believed architects should branch out to design objects, exerted significant influence on him, McDonough says.

These days, though, his base of operations is more diffuse, with a long list of international commissions requiring him to be on the road much of the year. “Observing new cultures informs and enriches my work. But as I move into the next phase of my life,” he jokes, “I hope more and more people come to Charlottesville to see me.”

Susannah Drake ’87
Firm: dlandstudio, New York City
Notable Work: Rockefeller Center park, New York City; Madonna-funded girls’ boarding school near Lilongwe, Malawi; One Police Plaza park, New York City
On Architecture: “We can make landscapes that are more productive.”
On Dartmouth: “The Hop is a really brilliant machine for circulating people, moving them efficiently and smoothly through its corridors.”
Major: Art history with studio art
Grad School: Harvard

Fifteen years ago, when Drake emerged from grad school with a specialization in landscape design, the general population wasn’t much interested in the greenery and dirt around a building’s walls.

A sea change in attitudes about how to organize public space, prompted in no small part by newfound awareness about global warming, now makes Drake’s focus seem almost visionary.

“Being a landscape architect is very fashionable, but fashionable is good because it will help make the planet last longer,” says Drake, who credits her laser-like interest in the emerging field to an article she read about the revitalization of the Erie Canal.

Now another canal, Brooklyn’s Gowanus, is in the sights of her 5-year-old firm, which is based in the brownstone she calls home. Under Drake’s plan 11 acres of new parkland would—once funding is secured—flank the Gowanus, whose banks are notoriously polluted. The waterway would gift a park-starved neighborhood with green space.

As people start to discover the importance of well-planted public spaces, Drake hopes Dartmouth will someday offer architecture as a major, and not only to boost the ranks of its alumni designers. “Architecture incorporates sociology and geography and fine arts and science,” she says. “It’s what liberal arts is all about.”

Jonathan Marvel ’82
Firm: Rogers Marvel Architects, New York City
Notable Work: New York Stock Exchange park, Studio Museum Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, all in New York City
On Architecture: “I chose architecture to improve the conditions of those around us.”
On Dartmouth: “An architecture major isn’t necessary. A liberal arts education celebrates the broad-based understanding the profession requires.”
Major: Visual studies with
geography
Grad School: Harvard

Dartmouth seems to run in Marvel’s DNA, and so, too, does architecture. His father, Tom ’56, and grandfather, Gordon ’25, both practiced, and a great-uncle was Buckminster Fuller, the legendary inventor of the geodesic dome. Indeed, Marvel remembers when he was 4 visiting a job site in his native Puerto Rico and deciding there might be a career in this drawing-buildings thing.

Having a plan freed Marvel to pick out an eclectic selection of College courses that catered to his interest in urban design, with biology, government and philosophy classes all represented. He also covered an Upper Valley energy beat for The Dartmouth, writing stories about now-commonplace wind farms, wood-fired boilers and hydroelectric dams.

Today a third of Marvel’s firm’s projects involve parks and streetscapes such as the ersatz outdoor living room he created in front of the New York Stock Exchange when Broad Street was shut down after 9/11. True to his catholic tastes, he also fashions commercial lines of crystal stemware, tableware and furniture.

In many ways Marvel’s knack for comfortable, dynamic public spaces has a stylistic precedent in Dartmouth’s Green, which can nurture a “magical ad hoc interaction from casually bumping into somebody,” he says, “whether it’s a classmate, professor or friend.”

David K. Williams ’79
Firm: Davis Brody Bond Aedas, New York City
Notable Work: Columbia University’s Manhattanville expansion, New York-Presbyterian Hospital expansion, and Solow Towers, all in New York City
On Architecture: “Working in-house for one client showed me a side of the business most people don’t get to see.”
On Dartmouth: “The new arts building doesn’t respond contextually to Lebanon Street. It should be a more cohesive environment.”
Major: Visual studies
Grad School: Harvard

Architects aren’t all about genre-bending angular glass museums. Some have more utilitarian duties, as Williams did for 12 years as the director of design and construction for the Solows, a prominent New York real estate family. Among other notable projects Williams customized cavernous trading floors for banker tenants.

The problem-solving skills learned from overseeing 15 high- rises steeled Williams for his current gig: building the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. His new firm designed the below-grade museum that will envelop a memorial from Michael Arad ’91 [right], and Williams is tasked with making sure both go up on time. In his firm’s portion, ramped floors will descend 70 feet to a space with exhibits such as ambulances damaged in the terrorist attacks.

“If this were in the middle of Lyme, New Hampshire, it would be easy to do,” Williams says. Not so where 16 different state and city agencies, plus victims’ families, have had to sign off on the project.

In Hanover he’s working on plans for his former frat house, Tri Kap, which he advocates razing. “I have good memories,” he says, “but really all that’s worth saving are the bricks.”

Michael Arad ’91
Firm: Handel Architects, New York City
Notable Work: Earth School green roof/environmental classroom, New York City; International
Commerce Centre, Hong Kong; National September 11 Memorial, New York City
On Architecture: “There is a myth out there that architects get to control everything, and that is absolutely not true.”
On Dartmouth: “The buildings and the grounds make up such an important part of the Dartmouth experience. I remember the campus as almost a character.”
Major: Government
Grad School: Georgia Tech

Most architects work well into their twilight years before landing a career-altering, rock-star-level commission. Arad pulled off the unlikely move before he was 40, beating out 5,200 other designers in 2004 to win the plum World Trade Center memorial competition, which asked entrants to come up with a way to honor the victims of the 9/11 attacks in New York.

“People who are not established in their field,” he says, “do not usually have the opportunity to share their ideas like this.”

Titled “Reflecting Absence,” Arad’s design resembles a fountain in reverse, with water tumbling into two square pools that are outlines of the footprints of the former Twin Towers. “The idea was to tear open the fabric of real material, to present an inexplicable puncture,” he says.

The memorial retains these highly symbolic elements even after competing interests surrounding the project forced design revisions and delays. It now seems on track for a 2011, 10th-anniversary opening. This winter, with much of the steel in place in the memorial and the museum that encircles Arad’s creation—a project guided by David Williams ’79—the outline of both pools was unmistakable in the jumble of the site.

Keith Moskow ’83
Firm: Moskow Linn Architects, Boston
Notable Work: “Place of Remembrance” 9/11 memorial at Logan Airport, Boston; vacation homes on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts; sustainable renovations of Boston properties including the Conservation Law Foundation headquarters and 145 Tremont St.
On Architecture: “A career goal was to design a perfect teapot. Every single house has one, and we are always reinventing the wheel.”
On Dartmouth: “I did a term at UC-San Diego to improve my surfing, but there are great buildings in La Jolla. It opened my eyes to different architectural vocabularies.”
Major: Visual studies
Grad School: Penn

As a child Moskow was never much of a sailor, but building three boats in his garage during an off-semester junior year whetted his appetite for design.

Years later ship-like details would notably turn up in many of his creations, the upside-down-hull-shaped roof of a Lincoln, Massachusetts, bus shelter, and the translucent sail-evoking peaked tops of his Newton, Massachusetts, Swamp Huts. “I’m not afraid of using curvilinear forms,” he says. “I like to see how they come together.”

But it’s the 10 percent of Moskow’s portfolio dedicated to “urban interventions” that, even if they’re purely conceptual, contain perhaps his boldest creations. One is a fiberglass clamshell of a hood that attaches to lighting poles allowing smokers to puff away without getting soaked by rain.

Moskow admires ingenious design such as Charles Moore’s Hood Museum, which deftly borrowed elements of adjacent structures to fit harmoniously on a narrow, low-lying lot. “I always wondered how you would slip a building in there,” Moskow says.

Javier Arizmendi ’86
Firm: Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), San Francisco
Notable Work: Poly International Plaza, Guangzhou, China; De Menil Museum chapel, Houston; Jasper Johns studio, New York City
On Architecture: “Le Corbusier created the persona of the architect as an engineer, and I think that’s been inspiring to many of us.”
On Dartmouth: “Kresge shows that there’s a way of being contextual without doing historical architecture.”
Major: Art history and engineering
Grad School: Harvard

Arizmendi might have become a physicist if it weren’t for his grandfather, an artist who frequently took his grandson along on expeditions to the Mexican countryside, where they would pull off the road, set up easels and paint.

Throughout his childhood and at Dartmouth that early brush with culture helped Arizmendi keep his spatial right-brain skills sharp and well developed, even as he pursued science-heavy studies, he says.

It’s a balancing act that comes in handy at SOM, one of the world’s largest firms. There Arizmendi has helped create monumental mega-block, mixed-use projects, especially in China, that need to be graced with attractive glass-and-steel towers despite often quotidian ground-level functions.

Combining art and technology “is really the idea behind architecture,” says Arizmendi, who points out that France’s soaring Chartres Cathedral perfectly embodies this tension.

Like other architects he admits that the current recession is taking a toll on the profession, even at a huge company such as SOM, though its extensive international presence has insulated the firm somewhat. But it has never been easy to make a quick buck in architecture.

“It’s like a soccer game,” Arizmendi says, “and if you are not sure you want to be on the field you will lose, so play as hard as you can.”

John Vansant ’81
Firm: Smith & Vansant Architects, Norwich, Vermont
Notable Work: Casque & Gauntlet renovation, Dartmouth; Shambala Buddhist center in the former Catamount brewery, White River Junction, Vermont; private homes, New Hampshire and Vermont
On Architecture: “We don't deliver ego-driven iconic products. We are more geared to contextual and beautiful and efficient buildings that sit comfortably on their sites.”
On Dartmouth: “Architecture is such a classic commingling of disciplines, but I feel it gets short shrift in terms of curriculum and budget.”
Major: English
Grad School: University of Virginia

Basking in the sun by a lake after a post-graduation Grateful Dead concert inspired Vansant to create homes that rely on solar power. It wouldn't be until years later, after a fierce snowstorm blasted him while he was nailing shingles to a Denver roof, that he would actually ditch contracting work for grad school to learn how to design such homes. Many of those houses, with photovoltaic electric systems or sun-heated hot water, dot the landscape of the Upper Valley. There Vansant’s six-person firm has contributed modular deep-woods contemporaries as well as sloping gabled lake houses with wrap-around porches that are dead ringers for what was previously there. Yes, his big-city peers may get dibs on high-profile skyscrapers, stadiums and parks, but Vansant enjoys having a small firm because he can immerse himself in projects in a hands-on manner from start to finish “to a ridiculous extent,” he says.

Though they may not be multi-story, Vansant’s institutional contributions—churches, town halls and libraries, plus the occasional fraternity house, such as Dartmouth’s Zeta Psi, which he’s renovating—can still stand out in their postcard-ready settings. A still unrealized dream, though, is to replace the Choates, whose leaky uninsulated masonry walls are notably energy-inefficient. “Bad energy design is not just bad to live in,” he says, “but bad for the environment.”

Roc Caivano ’66
Firm: Roc Caivano Architects, Bar Harbor, Maine
Notable Work: Jordan Pond House, Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor; dorms and classrooms, College of the Atlantic, Bar Harbor; Beta Theta Pi, Dartmouth
On Architecture: “Regionalism is not the point of focus for much creative work, but I’m kind of unapologetic about it.”
On Dartmouth: “There are other institutions where architecture is spelled with a capital ‘A,’ and at Dartmouth it’s spelled with a small ‘a,’ so it’s open to everybody.”
Major: Studio art
Grad School: Yale

One of Caivano’s fondest Dartmouth memories is having a professor approach him from out of the blue and hand him a key. The professor liked Caivano’s paintings, and the key gave access to a special studio where Caivano could put oils on canvas in private. “ ‘Just leave it the way you found it when you’re done,’ he told me,” Caivano says.

Today it’s Caivano who plays gatekeeper—of Maine’s Mount Desert Island, where his four-employee practice has renovated shingle-sided summer mansions from the early 1900s with a deliberately light touch, in a style similar to his frequent contributions to Acadia National Park. Currently he’s turning a former naval base there into an educational complex. “You really have an obligation as a professional to carefully weave any rich historical fabric with the 21st century,” he says.

Caivano’s designs were more cutting-edge in the early 1970s, when, after Yale, he camped out of his car in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, unsure of what his future would be. Later he built a solar home in upstate New York with the capacity to burn junk mail as a backup heat source.

There would also be a stint with Dartmouth-favorite Robert Venturi in Philadelphia, where Caivano savored the similarities between Independence Hall and its sturdier clone, Baker Library, which “is such a strong, elegant fortress,” he says. “I found it very welcoming.”

Catherine Truman ’89
Firm: Ann Beha Architects, Boston
Notable Work: Charles Bulfinch-designed house preservation, Boston; chapel, St. Paul’s School, Concord, New Hampshire; Adirondack- and contemporary-style homes, New Hampshire and Massachusetts
On Architecture: “Studying architecture leads to a greater understanding of urbanism. Even people who go into finance need to learn this.”
On Dartmouth: “When I told my professors I was writing a senior thesis on architecture they practically jumped out of their chairs with excitement.”
Major: Art history
Grad School: Yale

Sanborn Library, with its afternoon teas, tight-knit community and intimate social scale, was Truman’s favorite campus building, which might explain her choice to join Ann Beha Architects. The projects taken on by the 25-employee New England-centric firm include renovations of prep-school chapels and midsize art museums, as well as historic icons such as Boston’s Charles Street Jail, now a hotel.

Truman’s sensitivity to the importance of preserving antique forms was honed while studying Foucault in London, cataloging National Park Service properties and assisting New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission, in addition to design jobs in Alabama, Istanbul and Croatia.

Good design comes from answering, “Why do things look like this in Paris versus Berlin versus Boston?” she says. She’d like Dartmouth to require all students to take one architecture class—“It’s so fundamental to understanding the world around you.”

She feels fortunate to have attended a school that provided her a grant to visit Frank Lloyd Wright’s buildings in Chicago. Poking around other quads only intensified her
appreciation for Dartmouth.

C.J. Hughes is based in New York City. He has written about architecture for The New York Times and Architectural Record.