Hanover, NH The newly renovated and expanded Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth has opened to the public, following two years of construction.

Designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects | Partners (TWBTA), the expanded museum ties together the college’s academic and research priorities with an emphasis on the arts at Dartmouth. The Hood’s encyclopedic collection is one of the largest of its kind in the United States, comprising more than 65,000 works spanning a variety of media and historical periods.

Tod Williams of TWBTA said, “We have worked closely with the team at the Hood Museum and Dartmouth College to design a progressive teaching museum while preserving many of the distinctive features of the Charles Moore building. The conversation throughout has been both pedagogical and architectural. The renovation of and addition to the existing Hood creates a complementary dialogue between old and new, extending the identity and functions of the institution well into the future.”

Specifically, the expansion increases the Hood’s exhibition space by 42% to 16,350 s/f, adds three classrooms with the latest object-study technology – tripling the number of student classroom visits the museum can host – and increases the total number of galleries from 10 to 16, with the addition of six new galleries. The expansion also increases the Hood’s overall square footage by more than 50%, to 62,400 s/f. The project budget for the renovation and expansion is $50 million, 95% of which has been raised to date through private donations.