Out of the Shadows Robert Twombly (bio) Francis R. Kowsky. Country, Park & City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. ix + 378 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $45.00. Calvert Vaux (1824–95) left London for Newburgh, New York, in 1850 to be the assistant of architect and landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing in whose house within two years he met Frederick Law Olmsted. How fortunate, one might suppose, that a twenty-something novice eager to make his mark upon a strange environment should have access to two such men, the one already, the other soon to be, a giant in his field. And fortunate indeed it was. As Downing’s professional successor and Olmsted’s professional collaborator Vaux had his ticket to success. But these relationships were not one-way. The case can be made that by expanding the practice he inherited upon Downing’s untimely death in 1852 and with his own book, Villas and Cottages (1857), Vaux helped sustain the already immense demand for “Downingesque,” that is, “picturesque” dwellings and gardens. And the case can also be made that had he not persuaded Olmsted to join him in the planning of New York’s Central Park in 1857, Olmsted would not have become a landscape architect. Vaux may have benefitted from knowing these men but both, either posthumously or in life, owed him something. His sweet fortune in meeting them had an unexpectedly bitter side-effect, however, for never—not in life and not in death—did he emerge from their shadow. Until now, that is, because Francis R. Kowsky’s unstated though unhidden agenda is to detach his subject from Downing and Olmsted when appropriate and give him his due, to assess his work in and of itself, to locate Vaux in the national design scene without qualifiers, in short, to determine his actual standing. Kowsky is not tilting at windmills. One has only to walk through Central Park for which Vaux designed all the original structures including Belvedere Castle, the Terrace, and the Mall, or to inspect his stunning proposal for the main exhibition hall at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (a far superior edifice to what was erected) to discover a real talent. Vaux also designed the initial stages of the American Museum of Natural History and [End Page 693] the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, more than a dozen lodging houses and industrial schools for that city’s Children’s Aid Society, and a goodly number of town houses and suburban villas for people as prominent as presidential candidate Samuel J. Tilden and painter Frederic E. Church, whose “Olana” (1870), Kowsky convincingly argues, based on a skillful interpretation of documents, was as much the architect’s conception as the client’s, contrary to conventional wisdom. Vaux was the first to propose a middle-class apartment house for New York, the “Parisian Buildings” (1857), designed but not erected twelve years before Richard Morris Hunt’s Stuyvesant Apartments, usually cited as the first such structure there. No one has shown as forcefully as Kowsky that Vaux was a very good architect. In landscape design Vaux collaborated with Olmsted on Central, Prospect, Fort Greene, Riverside, and Morningside parks, among others in New York, on the University of California (Berkeley) campus, South Park in Chicago, the Buffalo Park system, the State Reservation at Niagara Falls, the plan of Riverside, Illinois, and much more. These were true collaborations, as Olmsted was the first to acknowledge. On Central Park, for example, he wrote in 1877 that Vaux had not only “made the original studies” for the architectural work over which “his superintendence of . . . details was personal, direct, and controlling,” but also that no one “has more claim than Mr. Vaux to the design of the Park or to what . . . is termed ‘the aesthetic arrangement of the grounds’” (p. 266). In the cases of Central, Prospect, and other parks, the original concepts were Vaux’s, later to be refined and executed in partnership. Elsewhere, however, he sometimes worked alone (on the Parliament Grounds in Ottawa, the Bryn Mawr College campus in Pennsylvania, and the New York University Grounds in the...
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May 1, 2014
Rolf Diamant 
Open Access