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| An Octagon House |
The mid-19th century saw an American fascination with exotic architecture, and forms from other countries -- Turkish pavilions, Swiss chalets, Chinese pagodas -- began springing up. The unique American contribution to innovative house shapes was the octagon house, a style made popular by amateur architect Orson Squire Fowler.
The Octagon house is easily recognized by the eight-sided shape of the exterior walls. Occasional examples show six-, ten-, twelve-, or sixteen-sided forms; a few are round. The octagonal shape lent itself to various embellishments of style, from Greek Revival to Georgian, and even Moorish.
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| Fowler's book... "The Octagon House, A Home for All" that helped launch the fad of building Octagon houses. |
This rare style flourished for a brief period in the mid-19th century, when author, lecturer and amateur architect Orson S. Fowler published a book extolling the virtues of the eight-sided dwelling: "The Octagon House, A Home for All."
The octagonal form had been used in public buildings in the past [e.g., the Roman Tower of Winds in Athens, Greece]; but now as a concept for domestic architecture it had a dedicated and convincing champion. Fowler's books, stressing the functional and stylistic advantages of the octagon house, found many readers and several hundred followers who sprinkled the landscape from New England to Wisconsin with eight-sided houses, barns, churches, schoolhouses, carriage houses, greenhouses, smokehouses, and privies.
The Gothic Revival and the Italianate expressions had not been lost upon Orson Fowler. From the Italianate he borrowed the cupolas which lighted his stairwells, the bracketed roofs, and the verandas. A grand central staircase crowned by a cupola was a favorite feature of eight-sided houses. Many of the two-story structures also boasted wraparound porches and hipped roofs with wide eaves and decorative brackets. From the Gothic came the pointed arch windows and other embellishments in the octagon house he built for himself on a rise overlooking the Hudson River.
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| Typical floor plan. |
A few thousand octagon homes and structures were built, but they never lined neighborhoods like more traditional styles. Today, most of the several hundred surviving examples can be found in the Midwest, New York and Massachusetts. They range from humble, unadorned country dwellings to elaborate mansions.
Unfortunately, Fowler's own 60-room estate, "Fowler's Folly" near Fishkill, N.Y., is no longer standing.
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| Fowler stressed that an octagon encloses more floor space per linear foot of exterior wall than does the usual square or rectangle, thereby "reducing both building costs and heat loss through the walls." |
