Calvert Vaux. Architecte.Met Museum Tilden residence. L'Architecture Americaine. Ph. Albert Levy




Descripción de la Tilden Residence en Artistic Houses. Vol 2. pt. 1 Smithsonian libraries

Una visita reciente al Museo Metropolitano de Nueva York me puso sobre la pista de la labor realizada por Calvert Vaux uno de los arquitectos incluidos en el álbum L' Architecture Americaine con fotografías de Albert Levy.
Una vez más es necesario reconocer la labor de este fotógrafo capaz de documentar en tiempo real-1876/1884-  la labor de los mejores arquitectos que trabajan en Estados Unidos en ese momento.
La arquitectura  de Calvert Vaux incluye el diseño de parques como es el caso del Central Park de Nueva York, su labor en el diseño de museos como son los casos  del Metropolitan Museum ( varios arquitectos a la largo de su construcción), American Museum of Natural History. También mencionar Prospect Park en Brooklyn entre otras actuaciones.

Fotógrafo Albert Levy. Arquitectos en L'Architecture Americaine

Calvert Vaux Arquitecto. Documentos sobre su labor.


Un amplio y detallado pdf, publicado en un boletín del Museo con la historia de su edificacion y de sus arquitectos a lo largo del tiempo, destacando, con todo detalle la labor realizada por Calvert Vaux en su construcción.

Halic Collection The Art Institute Chicago
Vistas del Museo Metropolitano en los fondos de la Halic, colección fotográfica de arquitectura del Art Institute de Chicago.
Consisting of approximately 11,000 images that document the architecture, landscape and urban planning of sites across the United States—with a particular emphasis on Chicago and its suburbs—and, to a lesser extent, internationally, The Historic Architecture and Landscape Image collection, or HALIC, contains mounted photographic prints, lantern slides (both black and white and hand-colored), and postcards dating from the 1860s to the 1970s.

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Title/Project Name Metropolitan Museum of Art
Street Address/Neighborhood Central Park facing Fifth Ave. between 80th and 84th Sts.
City New York City
State/Province New York
Country United States
Date Designed or Built 1874-1880
Architect/Designer/Creator Vaux, Calvert
Mould, J. Wrey
Date of View c.1910
View or Detail Type Exterior
Image Notes Central Park Obelisk visible at left


American Museum of Natural History



Title/Project Name American Museum of Natural History
Street Address/Neighborhood Central Park West and 79th St.
City New York City
State/Province New York
Country United States
Date Designed or Built 1872-1877, 1892-1898, 1899
Architect/Designer/Creator Vaux, Calvert
Mould, J. Wrey
Cady, J.C., and Company
Cady, Berg & See

Calvert Vaux.Architect and planner.

Vaux initiated the process that led to the creation of Central Park in New York and Prospect Park in Brooklyn, and persuaded Olmsted to join him in both endeavors. Their designs for these two prototypical country parks in the city were of crucial importance in forming the urban face of nineteenth-century industrial America.
Vaux also found an outlet for his concern in designs for shelters for the Children's Aid Society and for the first buildings of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History, soon to become two of New York's pre-eminent cultural institutions

.......Few men of his generation left legacies more magnificent than Central Park and Prospect Park.
....Calvert Vaux, born in London's Pudding Lane in 1824, was trained
in the English method as an apprentice to the architect Lewis Hockalls Cottingham 

...One year later Harper's New Monthly Magazine featured Vaux's work in a series of articles which formed the core of Villas and Cottages, one of the most influential domestic design model books of the Victorian Era.
........Harper's Monthly to note: "The Central Park is the finest work of art ever executed in this country ... the exquisite forms of the ground in every directionthe perfection of the roadwork and gardening-the picturesque and beautiful bridges-the lovely sweeps of water contrasted Witll lawn banks-the pictorial effect of the telTace upon the water, so that you drive out of the City into the landscape . ... "
........In 1874, he designed the first buildings for the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the American Museum of Natural History. The noted artist Frederic E. Church called on Vaux to prepare the initial design for "Olana," his villa on the Hudson, and ex-governor Samuel J. Tilden had him combine two row houses on Gramercy Park into a single grand residence (now home to the National Arts Club

Villas and Cottages. Calvert Vaux. Archive org


Villas and Cottages Albert Vaux

  • Country, Park  City: The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux.Book.By Francis R. Kowsky:New York Times " The Hidden Half of Central Park"
    Vaux and his other associates, including the brilliant and disreputable Jacob Wrey Mould, not Olmsted, were responsible for the park's splendid architectural accents: among them designs for more than 40 individually wrought bridges (which Kowsky rather hyperbolically thinks ''Vaux's greatest architectural legacy''), 

    Vaux contributed two important urban residential types: the upscale apartment house and its poorer cousin, the low-rent housing project. He was an early -- perhaps the earliest -- advocate of the domestic block, which he called ''Parisian flats.'' He delivered a paper on the subject in 1857, a dozen years before the building of Richard Morris Hunt's Stuyvesant Apartments

 

National Arts Club Tilden Residence 

The National Arts Club is located in the historic Tilden Mansion. 15 Gramercy Park was built in the 1840's and its original flat-front, iron-grilled appearance matched the style of the houses still maintained on the west side of Gramercy Park. Samuel Tilden acquired 15 Gramercy Park in the 1860's, and in the 1870's gave the house a massive overhaul. Tilden hired Calvert Vaux, a famed architect and one of the designers of Central Park to "victorianize" the facade with sandstone, bay windows and Gothic Ornamentation.

The Tilden Mansion is both a designated New York Landmark and a National Historic Landmark. In the 1960's, New York declared 15 Gramercy Park South a New York Landmark, and in 1976, the Federal government declared it a National Historic Landmark. 

 

 La foto  de la Residencia Tilden, realizada por Albert Levy, en la Halic Collection del Art Institute 



Datos
Title/Project Name Tilden, Samuel J., Residence
Alternate Title/Project Name Twentieth Street Residences
National Arts Club
Street Address/Neighborhood 15 Gramercy Park S between Park Ave. and Irving Pl.
City New York City
State/Province New York
Country United States
Date Designed or Built 1881-1884
Architect/Designer/Creator Vaux & Radford
Date of View 1884-1895
View or Detail Type Exterior
Image Notes perspective view of Tilden and neighboring houses, with man at window of house on right; from Albert Levy's Architectural Photographic Series, Series 16, No. 274