Although Calvert Vaux was two years younger than Frederick Law Olmsted, it’s hard not to think of Vaux as the old, wise master that taught and nurtured Olmsted.
While Olmsted spent his youth trying to figure out what he wanted to do—Sailor? Scientific farmer? Travel writer? Journalist? Park Superintendent?—Vaux was building a distinguished career as an architect.
Born and trained in England, a young Calvert Vaux was hired and came to America as Andrew Jackson Downing’s partner. Downing owned a plant nursery in Newburgh, NY, and he published a monthly journal, The Horticulturalist, which was known nationally. His vision for a new American aesthetic connected to and influenced by the wilderness was hugely influential to readers in the young nation. As a result, Downing had started taking commissions designing the landscapes for wealthy people’s estates. He found he needed an architect who could design homes that worked in harmony with his efforts to blend with the environment.
Downing & Vaux were a successful team with a clear delineation of tasks. Estate grounds—paths, plantings, water features—were by Downing, the home and all other buildings were by Vaux.
From the very start of Vaux’s collaboration with Olmsted, in terms of who did what, things got cloudy. Like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the duo agreed to take equal billing for each of the projects they worked on together, starting with their prize-winning plan for Central Park, known as The Greensward Plan. Of the two men, only Vaux had the training, skill, and experience to do the work on his own. So, it’s always seemed both generous and telling that he saw talents in Olmsted—despite his non-existent portfolio—that were worthy of acknowledging and cultivating.
As their collaboration grew designing parks across the country, Vaux continued to show an incredible restraint and humility in how he worked his art.
Unlike private estates where the home is central to the plan, both Olmsted and Vaux felt that in the public parks all construction should be kept to a bare minimum. If any building was required, it should follow Downing’s principle of having its design defer to the environment it’s set in. At all costs, the sense of wilderness should be maintained and all human artifice muted.
In many ways, as magnificent as Central Park is, their first effort is a poor example of this principle. Along with a giant reservoir in the middle, the park is teeming with ornate bridges, a lengthy mall, a boat house, shelters, gazebos, a world renowned plaza and fountain, and a storybook castle. It’s all designed to blend and enhance the environment magically, but there sure is a lot of it.
Starting with their next parks in Brooklyn—Fort Greene Park and Prospect Park —where they had more control and fewer restraints, the emphasis became on peaceful paths winding through lawns and forests all leading to stunning vistas. While Central Park is full of Vaux’s architectural work, in later parks it’s scant to missing entirely. Prospect has three glorious tunnels and a couple fine bridges, but only one building remains. The two parks they designed in Connecticut (Bridgeport and New Britain) and the one in Massachusetts (Fall River) have no buildings or bridges remaining that he designed. Increasingly, they were sharing the same landscape design responsibilities.
Olmsted actually came to call all forms of construction in his parks “furniture,” and later in his life said that where buildings begin, the park ends. So, where did that leave Vaux, the architect this “furniture?”
Well, like all bands where one musician is getting all the credit, Vaux and Olmsted eventually parted ways in the early 1870s, each pursuing solo careers. Olmsted was a star on a rise with a big project in Montreal, Canada in the works, but Vaux had equally exciting, long-gestating work on the horizon. Two museums (art and natural history) had always been planned to be associated with Central Park. As funding finally was in place, Vaux won the commission to design both buildings.
What we know today as the Museum of Natural History and Metropolitan Museum of Art look nothing like the Victorian palaces Vaux designed and built, but his work remains at the heart of each. Much like what’s happened in all of his parks to varying degrees, other architects have added their own layers to his work, completely masking it.
Other buildings and landscapes he designed have survived and fared better, and luckily, he returned to work on several key park projects with Olmsted later in life, such as Niagara Falls and Downing Park in Newburgh, NY. Both projects still exist, of course, and continue to delight their visitors.
But to me, Vaux’s influence is apparent in all of Olmsted’s work, even when Vaux wasn’t directly involved.
When Olmsted became independent and had a firm with his sons, his approach built off what he had started with Vaux. Except when wealthy and influential clients had a say in what they did (as with Stanford University in California, or Biltmore in North Carolina, for example), there were no great deviations in style and approach. When Olmsted started training apprentices to join his firm, he knew the skills were transferrable, because he had learned them himself from Vaux.
Thank you and happy birthday, Calvert, for all you did and everyone you inspired!
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