The Octagon House: A Home for All

by Orson Squire Fowler

Paperback, 1973

Status

Available

Call number

NA7125 .F775

Genres

Publication

Dover Pubns (1973), 192 pages

Description

In the mid-19th Century, America was host to a curious architectural trend: the octagonal house. Such eight-sided homes'as well as schools, churches, barns, and businesses'were popping up across the country so quickly that by 1857 over 1,000 had been built. Though the craze has long since subsided, the book that started it all remains a valuable and curious artifact of architectural history. A phrenologist by trade and eccentric Renaissance man by character, Orson S. Fowler, subscribed to the principle that form follows function in architecture years before the edict was popularized by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright. For a multitude of reasons explored at length in these pages, Fowler determined that an octagonal house provides for the maximal utilization of space and resources like heat and water. Years ahead of his time with respect to his concerns about energy efficiency, Fowler includes plans that call for central heating, running water, and ?speaking tubes'. Modern readers will likely be amused by his short sermon on the potential benefits of an ?indoor water closet'. Though Fowler himself was never trained as an architect, he supports his assertions with strong reasoning and even includes plans and instructions for designing and constructing an octagon house. As the long-dormant octagonal home craze heats up once again, The Octagon House continues to be highly sought after for its creative architectural suggestions, and its cheerful, engaging, and quirky tone. True to character, Fowler folds a great deal of vivacious, offbeat commentary into this treatise on octagonal architecture. With plenty of sudden left turns and amusing anecdotes, this high-quality re-issue of 1848?s The Octagon House is sure to delight anyone who appreciates art, architecture, and curious minds.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member R0BIN

I can't imagine building a house based solely on this book but many people did. Between 1848 when the first edition of this book was published and the Civil War, many octagon houses were built. Orson Fowler lived in his own octagon house between Route 9 and the Hudson River in Dutchess County for a

relatively short time before moving to a more conventional (and cheaper) house. It was used as a boarding house and a school before being abandoned and vandalized. It is a testament to the sturdiness of the construction that local authorities finally had to dynamite the house to raze it. There is no longer any sign of the house on Fowler Road.

Fowler claimed that the octagon house was cheaper to build and healthier to live in than a four-sided house.

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LibraryThing member PuddinTame

This is a reprint of the 1853 book: A Home for All, or The Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building. The style was quite popular in the early to mid 1800s. The book consists chiefly of various arguments including both aesthetic and practical, for the superiority of the octagon over any other style

of house. The aesthetic arguments are, as such things tend to be, somewhat humorous to later generations. People fond of the picturesque and the quaint would probably not agree with Fowler's argument that a dome is obviously more attractive than gables.

The book is well-illustrated with 19 black-and-white photographs of octagonal buildings and 32 figures, including the floor plans of a variety of houses, including several different arrangements of rooms in octagon houses.

It would be very interesting to see this re-issued with color photographs of octagon houses replacing and supplementing the original text and illustrations.

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