The latest design in a series of projects completed by RBA for Dartmouth College, the Black Family Visual Arts Center consolidates Dartmouth’s Studio Art and Film and Television Studies departments into a single building. The campus landscape for this new building is designed to be a setting for sculptural installations and an extension of the Visual Arts Center’s ground-level social and public spaces.
This new Arts Plaza serves as a formal southern entrance for the town of Hanover to the Dartmouth campus Arts Precinct. The design intent was in experientially and visually connecting each of the surrounding four arts buildings to their new plaza. The landscape design extends the new building’s performance space out into the public realm, complementing the transparency in programming and circulation within the new structure. Large plazas and green spaces act as improvisational performance spaces, from small social scales to capacity-setting events. Sustainable site strategies include the harvesting of condensate from mechanical equipment and the collection of stormwater from the building roof to be used for irrigating plantings. Street trees are irrigated by stormwater run-off from adjacent sidewalks directed to the soil through a permeable pavement.