Renovation injects a new ‘sense of life’ into Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center for the Arts

A Building Team that included the design architect Snøhetta, the engineering firm Arup, and GC Consigli Construction recently completed a $123.8 million renovation and expansion of Hopkins Center for the Arts on the Hanover, N.H., campus of Dartmouth College.

The revamped art center, which reopened in mid October, is part of an on-campus Arts District, whose masterplan Arup and the college came up with in 2017-18. The District now encompasses the Black Family Visual Arts Center and the Hood Museum of Art.

The Hopkins Center (known locally as The Hop) was built in 1962, and didn’t sufficiently allow for experimentation and flexibility that modern arts centers require. It also lacked what Joseph Solway, Arup’s Arts + Culture, Sports + Entertainment Business Leader, says were “informal hangout spaces” for artistic and performance interaction that this recent project added.

Arup and Snøhetta have had a longtime relationship in the cultural sector, dating back to their collaboration on the Opera House in Oslo, Norway, which opened in 2007; and more recently the Royal Diriyah Opera House in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, which is scheduled to open in 2028.

Solway confirms that most of the new space at the 70,000-sf Hopkins Center is within the addition of the 15,000-sf Daryl and Steven Roth Wing that includes a black-box performance space with shock-absorbent flooring to accommodate a dance studio, a programming first for the building, says Solway. (Steven Roth, a Dartmouth grad, is CEO of Vornado Realty Trust.)

According to Valley News, the Wing includes a recital hall and a theater lab, the latter named after the actress Mindy Kaling, a Dartmouth graduate. The newspaper notes that the Lab’s dimensions mirror those of the Hop’s Moore Theater, making performances easier to transition from rehearsals to staging.

Renovations included new staggered seating and improved acoustics at Spaulding Auditorium, whose 792-seat capacity is roughly 100 seats fewer than before this project.

Tamping down sound between performance spaces

Arup’s scope of work included acoustics, A/V, lighting, theater consulting, MEP, SE, and fire protection. Solway says that one of this project’s challenges was mitigating sound leakage from one performance space to another, which was made more complex by new construction being added to an existing building.

Another challenge was bringing more natural light into the expanded building without giving too much exposure to performers while they are rehearsing (one of his pet design peeves, he says).

“We wanted to bring a sense of life to the building,” says Solway. Regular performance programming at the Hopkins Center is scheduled to begin next January.

Other AEC members of this project’s Building Team: Page (now part of Stantec), architect of record; Engineering Ventures (CE), Venue (cost consultant), Entro (signage and wayfinding), SGH (façade and waterproofing),