A year ago, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, reopened after a major remodeling by the New York firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners (TWBTA). As RECORD wrote then, this was indeed a radical transformation of a 34-year-old Postmodernist artifact by Charles Moore and Chad Floyd, of the Connecticut firm Centerbrook. We suggested that an assessment of the controversial project should wait until the 62,400-square-foot building had been functioning for a bit. Now it’s time. To the chagrin of those who hoped to keep Moore’s idiosyncratic imprint totally intact, the museum seems to have benefitted from this incarnation. Why is this the case?
Let’s go back to the beginning: in February 1986, RECORD commended the Hood for Moore and Floyd’s batterie de cuisine of Postmodern architectural allusions, from a Romanesque monastery and an outpost of the late Roman Empire to a 19th-century mill, along with a sprinkling of motifs reminiscent of Gunnar Asplund and Eliel Saarinen. As the magazine postulated, “The Hood is meant to improve with age.”
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