Please listen to the audio recording below while viewing this site to enhance your experience.
I would like to initially introduce you to Baker Berry Lobby through pictures and brief descriptions of the space. Baker Lobby is one of the most well know and trafficked parts of Dartmouth's campus. It is known to always be busting with students studying and socializing. As I will explore later on this website, Baker Lobby is a multifunctional space, meaning that it doesn't only serve one singular purpose, but many. However, many spaces on successful college campuses today have a space like this. In other words, students thrive in spaces that have both academic and social components and this type of place appears all over the country.
This first picture above shows, in my opinion the best angle of the space. It shows both the large size of the lobby but also the depth from the celling to the floor. Because of that depth, it creates the echoes of conversation one can hear throughout the entire room on the of the space. This picture also shows the general layout of the furniture in the room and how it is conducive to both conversion and work.
This next picture is a close up of some of the lounge chairs. They aren’t very plush chairs that will envelop you for hours, keeping this part of the environment work oriented instead of pure social. However, the one small table in the middle of the four chairs also implies that the space is conducive to conversation and not just work. There are multiple areas like this placed around the lobby, next to other areas that are designed to be more conducive to strictly studying with desks and chairs.
For this picture, I wanted to focus on the marble pattern on the floor of the lobby, one if its distinctive features. There aren’t any other marble floors on campus quite as distinguishing as this one. I think part of that is due to the size of the room it was applied to. In addition, the marble isn’t purely black or purely white. As you can see in the picture above, each color marble is imperfect, creating a different type of effect than that of an ice cream parlor-esque perfect black and white marble floor.
This picture shows the coffee window for King Arthur Flour. Although not operational in the picture, you can see into the window and notice the staff taking orders and the overflowing amounts of pastries and other goods they are selling. KAF is an integral part of the first floor of Baker, and that sentiment spills right out into the lobby, especially at busy times when the line snakes through the entire lobby.
