22 Facts About Calvert Vaux

Calvert Vaux FAIA was an English-American architect and landscape designer, best known as the co-designer, along with his protege and junior partner Frederick Law Olmsted, of what would become New York City's Central Park.

Calvert Vaux introduced new ideas about the significance of public parks in America during a hectic time of urbanization.

Calvert Vaux favored naturalistic and curvilinear lines in his designs.

Calvert Vaux left Newburgh in 1856 to grow his practice in New York City, where he began, received, and completed commissions with Olmsted, Withers, and Jacob Wrey Mould.

Calvert Vaux trained as an apprentice under the architect Lewis Nockalls Cottingham, a leader of the Gothic Revival movement interested in Tudor architecture.

Calvert Vaux trained under Cottingham until the age of twenty-six, befriending George Godwin and George Truefitt during his studies.

In 1850, Calvert Vaux exhibited a series of watercolor landscapes that he made while en route to the United States that caught the attention of Andrew Jackson Downing, a noted landscape architect in Newburgh, New York.

Calvert Vaux believed that architecture should be visually integrated into the surrounding landscape, and wanted to work with someone who was equally passionate.

Calvert Vaux accepted the opportunity and subsequently moved to the United States.

Calvert Vaux worked with Downing for two years and became a firm partner.

In 1857, Calvert Vaux recruited Frederick Law Olmsted, who had never before designed a landscape plan, to help with the Greensward Plan, which would become New York City's Central Park.

In 1865, Calvert Vaux and Olmsted founded Olmsted, Calvert Vaux and Co.

Calvert Vaux designed many structures to beautify the parks, but most of these have been demolished.

Calvert Vaux designed a large Canadian city park in the city of Saint John, New Brunswick called Rockwood Park.

In 1872, Vaux dissolved the partnership and went on to form an architectural partnership with George K Radford and Samuel Parsons.

Famous New York City buildings Vaux designed are the Samuel J Tilden House, and the original Ruskinian Gothic buildings, now largely invisible from exterior view, of the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Less familiar are twelve projects Calvert Vaux designed for the Children's Aid Society in partnership with Radford; the Fourteenth Ward Industrial School, pp.

The last collaboration between Calvert Vaux and Olmsted was Downing Park in Newburgh, given to the memory of Downing.

On November 19,1895, Calvert Vaux accidentally drowned in Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn while visiting his son Downing.

Calvert Vaux is buried in Kingston, New York's Montrepose Cemetery.

In 1998, the city of New York dedicated Calvert Vaux Park, situated in Gravesend overlooking the bay, to him.

In 1854, Calvert Vaux married Mary Swan McEntee, the sister of Jervis McEntee, a Hudson River School painter.