Features

From the porch of Smith Hall, Bencks has a good view of the future—and it looks a lot like the past. There's the expanse of lawn, the graceful trees, the traditional brick architecture of Scott and Congreve. On the left is Thompson Hall with its clock tower, as well as the familiar roof lines of Murkland and Hamilton Smith. The center of Durham is just a short walk down Main Street.

The Science Quad between Hewitt Annex and Rudman Hall as it is now, above, and in the future, below.

The college, the village, the landscape—all of them quintessentially New England and all of them visible from here on the porch—are foundational elements of UNH's master plan. Together, they constitute the setting where living and learning take place. Destroy them, and the UNH experience would be forever changed.

Smith Hall, which was built in 1908, lost its porch when the building fell into disrepair. In 1992, using old photos as a guide, the porch was recreated. "This is a wonderful piece of campus character," says Bencks, admiring the proportioned columns as he rocks on the porch swing. The view, Bencks says, provides a clear sense of what he calls "a humane and ideally proportioned environment."

Students who sit on this porch, who look out on the view framed by these columns, will have a certain slant on their UNH experience. The curve of a path, a particular tree, the way the sunlight glances off a certain window, the creak of a porch swing—these details are like fragile threads, barely noticed, that become woven tightly into the fabric of experience.

Preserving the best of the past as we march into the future remains a guiding principle of the master plan. Perhaps nowhere is this commitment so visible as it is in the auditorium of the renovated Murkland Hall. The original ceiling's intricate plaster work, crumbling and covered for decades with a drop ceiling, was painstakingly restored. Elegant windows that had been hidden are back in all their glory.

Another bank of windows in another recently renovated building offers a dramatic reminder that the natural environment, too, is part of UNH's heritage.

In Dimond Library's Hubbard Reading Room, the windows soar two stories along the entire east wall, opening the view to the ravine that runs through the middle of campus. The master plan calls for improvements to this natural area, as well as ongoing tree replacement throughout campus. "Very few schools have the natural resources we do," says Bencks. "The native landscape is critical to the teaching and research that goes on here."

Inside the library's reading room, students bend over their books. Pages turn. Mostly there is silence. Outside, trees bend in the wind. The light shifts. The changing panorama keeps company with the students at work like an ever-present muse.

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