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title: "Rauner Library | Dartmouth College – Keast & Hood"
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# Rauner Library | Dartmouth College

![Rauner Library | Dartmouth College](https://keast-hood.itigniter.com/media/imported/2025-11-Rauner-2-5x7-1.jpg)

Dual additions - one an external underground structure and another an innovative building-within-a-building interior structure - combine to house Dartmouth’s Special Collections Library.

The Rauner Library project was comprised of both internal and external additions to Webster Hall, a 1901 former auditorium. The external addition consists of a 4,000-sf underground rare book storage area. With underground connections to both Webster Hall and the adjacent Baker Library, the flat-plate concrete addition was designed to accommodate live and dead loads from the landscaped plaza above and included special waterproofing details to protect the precious documents housed within.

The 8,300-sf internal addition replaced the original wood floors with a four-story, steel-framed, flat-plate concrete structure. It was built within the high bay of the building to house book stacks. The structural design met numerous functional requirements, including library stack live-load criteria, minimizing the structural plate thickness to maximize the clear story height, seismic isolation from the existing structure, and a highly refined concrete specification to enable the structure to serve as the architectural finish material.

Rauner Library earned a 2002 Honor Award in the AIA National Design Awards program.

Principal

Constantine G. Doukakis, PE (retired)

Client

VSBA, LLC

Location

Hanover, NH

Project Type

Academic | Library

Project Scope

Renovation, Addition | Adaptive Reuse | Structural Intervention

Status

Completed: 1998

Cost

$7.5 Million

![Rauner Library | Dartmouth College](https://keast-hood.itigniter.com/media/imported/2025-11-Rauner-2-5x7-1.jpg)

![Rauner Library | Dartmouth College](https://keast-hood.itigniter.com/media/imported/2025-11-96127-P.3.jpg)

![Rauner Library | Dartmouth College](https://keast-hood.itigniter.com/media/imported/2025-11-08.jpg)

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