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9 unusual facts about Calvert Vaux


Calvert Vaux

Together they designed many significant projects, such as the grounds in the White House and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. Vaux’s work on the Smithsonian inspired an article he wrote for The Horticulturalist, of which Downing was the editor, in which he stated his view that it was time the government should recognize and support the arts.

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 1857, he became one of the founding members of the American Institute of Architects.

In 1856, he gained US citizenship and became identified with the city’s artistic community, “the guild,” joining the National Academy of Design, as well as the Century Club.

Francis Kowsky

He has published on nineteenth-century American architects and architecture including Frederick Withers, Calvert Vaux, and H. H. Richardson, as well as the architecture and landscape of Buffalo and northwestern New York State.

James Hall Office

Andrew Jackson Downing and his student Calvert Vaux were collaborating at the time, and designed it in the Italian villa style the former had popularized.

It is one of the few buildings remaining from a brief period of collaboration between Andrew Jackson Downing and Calvert Vaux.

Lewis Nockalls Cottingham

Calvert Vaux became in 1843, an articled pupil of Cottingham, who was one of the elders of the English Gothic Revival, had supervised the sometimes overzealous restoration of a number of important medieval churches.

Moses Sheppard

Because of the financial restrictions that Sheppard put in place the asylum, designed by Calvert Vaux, did not open until 1891, almost 34 years after Sheppard's death.


Blockhouse, Central Park

Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the designers of Central Park, treated Blockhouse No. 1 as a picturesque ruin, romantically overrun with vines and Alpine shrubbery.

Fourteenth Ward Industrial School

It was built for the Children's Aid Society in 1888-89, with funds provided by John Jacob Astor III, and was designed by the firm of Vaux & Radford in the Victorian Gothic style.

Jefferson Market Library

The commission for the new courthouse went to the firm of Vaux and Withers, but as Calvert Vaux was busy with the American Museum of Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the design fell to his partner, the English-born Frederick Clarke Withers.


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