This issue of RECORD has an unlikely star, since the architect and landscape designer Calvert Vaux was often overshadowed by his partners during his career. (He died at 70 by drowning while walking along Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn.) Yet the renovation of two projects by the London-born, New York–based Vaux proves he deserves a more knowing assessment. The first—perhaps his most famous, and designed with Frederick Law Olmsted—is in Central Park. A significant section of the park’s northeast corner has been reimagined by Susan T Rodriguez to better embody Olmsted and Vaux’s original vision, after the intervention of a 1960s swimming pool altered its landscape. The other featured project, designed with George Radford, is a former outpost of the Children’s Aid Society built on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1891 to serve the growing Yorkville tenement district. Now, In Studio has converted it to a homelike tutoring center with some philanthropic intentions of its own (online soon). The stepped-gable building is one of about a dozen such structures Vaux designed for the charitable organization, but this example was deemed in the worst shape among those still extant; its redbrick facade had been stuccoed over, a wing demolished, and interiors stripped away.

Other Brits play an outsize role, if you will, with this issue. The work of Kevin Carmody and Andy Groarke, of London–based firm Carmody Groarke, leads our Sustainability in Practice section. These 2010 Design Vanguards will also be speaking at our next Sustainability in Practice conference on September 10. Carmody Groarke takes sustainable building in new directions while adhering to a strong design approach. For instance, its renovation and extension to the Design Museum Gent in Belgium, scheduled to open next year, is a handsome structure whose facade comprises bricks made from city waste such as concrete from demolished buildings and disused ceramics, toilets, and car windshields. The pair will talk about their material research, joining Jeanne Gang and Stefano Boeri at the conference, the first to be held in Chicago. We are pleased to partner with the Illinois Institute of Technology for that event, which takes place at Mies van der Rohe’s Crown Hall. It immediately follows our celebration on September 9, also at Crown Hall, of this year’s Women in Architecture award-winners: Chandra Robinson, Emily McGlohn, Roberta Washington, Gina Bocra, and Cynthia Weese. Please join us for two days of inspired architecture in a building that has inspired architects for almost 70 years!