Parks
In 1857, Vaux recruited an inexperienced Frederick Law Olmsted, who had never before designed a landscape plan, to help design the Greensward Plan, which would become Central Park. They were able to obtain the commission through an excellent presentation that capitalized on Vaux's talents in landscape drawing and the inclusion of before-and-after sketches of the site. Together, they fought many political battles to make sure their original design remained intact and was carried out.
In 1865, Vaux called upon Olmsted and they decided to create a partnership. As Olmsted, Vaux and Company, they designed Prospect Park and Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, and Morningside Park in Manhattan. In Chicago they planned one of the first suburbs, called the Riverside Improvement Company in 1868. They were also commissioned to design a major park project in Buffalo, New York, which included The Parade (now Martin Luther King, Jr. Park), The Park (now the Delaware Park), and The Front (now simply Front Park). Vaux designed many structures to beautify the parks, but most of these have been demolished. Vaux also designed a large Canadian city park in the city of Saint John, New Brunswick called Rockwood Park it is one of the largest of its kind in Canada. In 1871, the partners designed the grounds of the New York State Hospital for the Insane in Buffalo and the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane in Poughkeepsie.
In 1872, Vaux dissolved the partnership and went on to form an architectural partnership with George Kent Radford and Samuel Parsons, Jr. He returned to working with Olmsted in 1889 to design the City of Newburgh's Downing Park as a memorial to their mentor. It would be the pair's last collaboration. On a foggy November 19, 1895, he drowned in an accident while he was visiting his son, Downing Vaux, in Brooklyn.
Throughout his lifetime, Vaux, while on his own and through various partnerships, designed and created dozens of parks across the country. He introduced new ideas about the significance of public parks in America during a hectic time of urbanization. This industrialization of the cityscape inspired him to focus on an integration of buildings, bridges and other forms of architecture into their natural surroundings. He favored naturalistic, rustic and curvilinear lines in his designs, and his design statements contributed much to today’s landscape and architecture.
Other famous New York City buildings Vaux designed are the Jefferson Market Courthouse, 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 Vaux designed for the Children's Aid Society in partnership with George Kent Radford; the 14th Ward Industrial School (1889), 256-58 Mott Street, facing the churchyard of Old St Patrick's Cathedral, and the Elizabeth Home for Girls (1892), 307 East 12th Street, both survive and are landmarked.
Vaux drowned in Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn, and is buried in Kingston, New York's Montrepose Cemetery. In 1998, the City of New York named a park looking onto Gravesend Bay as Calvert Vaux Park.
Read more about this topic: Calvert Vaux
Famous quotes containing the word parks:
“Perhaps our own woods and fields,—in the best wooded towns, where we need not quarrel about the huckleberries,—with the primitive swamps scattered here and there in their midst, but not prevailing over them, are the perfection of parks and groves, gardens, arbors, paths, vistas, and landscapes. They are the natural consequence of what art and refinement we as a people have.... Or, I would rather say, such were our groves twenty years ago.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travelers, cafés full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors full of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.”
—José Ortega Y Gasset (1883–1955)