The Irving Institute Building

The building's light-filled atrium offers a range of seating options for students and community members to study, collaborate, and just hang out.
The building's first-floor project lab offers a flexible space for students and community members to engage in hands-on energy projects.
The Fern, Dartmouth's newest cafe, offers hot and cold beverages and light fare, as well as a fireplace lounge area to relax and recharge.
The Commons, a kitchen and informal gathering space on the building's second floor, gives building residents a place to eat, connect, and enjoy the incredible view of Tuck Mall and Baker Library.

Tour the Building!

Self-Guided Tour

Visitors are welcome to do a self-guided tour during business hours.

Group Tours

Group tours can be arranged by request. Please email Molly.S.Dunn@dartmouth.edu for more information.

Video Tour

Take a look at the building via this video.

Building Hours

Home to the Irving Institute, the Dartmouth Sustainability Office, the Revers Center for Energy, Sustainability, and Innovation, the Dartmouth Climate Modeling and Impacts Group, and several Thayer School of Engineering faculty and researcher offices and labs, and the Fern Café, the Irving building offers a range of open work, study, and collaboration spaces as well as private offices and dedicated workspaces.

While some of the spaces on the second and third floor are reserved for faculty and staff use only, students are welcome to make themselves at home during business hours in any space marked open for study, work, or collaboration.

Main Level

Monday - Friday
7 a.m. - 8 p.m. — Open to the public
8 - 11 p.m. — Dartmouth community swipe access only

Second and Third Floors

Monday - Friday
8 a.m. - 6 p.m. — Open to the public

Fern Coffee and Tea Bar

During Term: Monday - Friday
9 a.m. - 3:30 p.m.

Energy and Sustainability Features

As visitors explore the facility, many of the systems that make the building so efficient won't be visible, but here are some of the energy and sustainability features that are designed to ensure it is the highest-performing building on campus:

Heating and Cooling: Water has 1,000 times the capacity to heat or cool compared to air so it is used throughout the building to keep occupants comfortable. Beneath the granite of the Atrium floor, a radiant flooring system pumps water through a series of tubes, providing a highly efficient means of regulating room temperature by circulating warm water to heat and cold water to cool the space. On the second and third floors, you'll find radiant ceiling panels in workspaces and radiant sails in the labs. Both sails and panels radiate heat or cold through their surfaces, which are typically quite large, thereby providing uniform cooling heating. On the back side of the panel are copper tubes that carry the water and are in contact with the front surface.

Super-Efficient Operable Windows: A cornerstone to the building's ability to minimize the need for artificial lighting, cooling, and heating are its windows. Each of the office windows has triple pane glass which means you can sit by them in the winter and feel comfortable since there are no drafts and no feeling of cold radiating towards you. Many of the windows can be opened by the building's energy management system to enhance natural ventilation and bring in cool dry air when appropriate.

Heat Recovery Technology: All buildings must bring in fresh air to maintain a healthy environment for their occupants. In the Institute building, stale, warm air passes through a heat exchanger that warms up the colder fresh air from outside. Doing so can recover a large fraction of the energy that would normally be lost if the air from inside were directly vented to the outside. Similarly in the summer, the cool stale indoor air exchanges its cold with warm, moist air making the incoming air cooler and dryer.

Rooftop Solar Panels: In the next phase of the project, photovoltaic panels will be installed on the building's roof to help power the building residents' work and reduce the building's overall carbon footprint. Roughly 90 kilowatts of solar panels will generate enough electricity to provide a large fraction of the building's power needs and will do so for the next 25 years.

About the Building

Energy is a crossroads, where technology, policy, culture, geopolitics, economics, and environment come together. The location of the new home for the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy and Society embodies this cross-cutting nature of energy. Sited between the Tuck School of Business and the Thayer School of Engineering, and in the direct view of the Baker Library Tower, the symbolic heart of the College's liberal arts commitment, the building serves as a nexus of Dartmouth energy and society research, education, and engagement, across all disciplines.

Construction of the four-story building began in October 2019, and opened to the public in late March 2022. The highly energy efficient 55,000-square-foot facility contains teaching and learning spaces, faculty and research offices, demonstration labs, meeting and collaboration spaces, a cafe, and other spaces designed to foster informal interaction among faculty, researchers, and students. In 2024, the building received LEED Platinum certification, the top status a building can receive from the U.S. Green Building Council for design achievements in sustainability.

The Institute building is home to Dartmouth's Sustainability Office, the Revers Center for Energy, Sustainability, and Innvation, several Thayer labs and faculty offices, and the Dartmouth Climate Modeling and Impacts Group.